Galaxy Killers

The further you get from earth, the more terrifying space becomes. We read about supernovas, quasars, black holes, deadly radiation, and other calamities that are bigger than our imaginations. Yet we can reassure ourselves that those are so far away that a, say, collapsing star happened millions of years ago and we are just now seeing it because it happened light-years away. Well we can tell ourselves that's reassuring, but it also makes us wonder about the stuff that has happened since then that we cannot know about because the light hasn't reached us yet.

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell explains one of those far away phenomena, the quasar. It was hard for scientists to figure out what a quasar is all about, because the information we got was so confusing. Quasars are relatively small, very bright yet very far away, and we've seen about a million of them. How does that work? It turns out the secret is black holes. And now we are back into terrifying territory.