That hurdle has now been cleared. A newly analyzed radio image reveals twin lobes stretching roughly 66,000 light-years on each side of a quasar called J1601+3102.

Because the radio waves began their trip across space more than 12.1 billion years ago, the observation shows the quasar as it was when the universe had completed only about nine percent of its history.

This particular quasar, J1601+3102, belongs to a youthful universe – it flared into view when the cosmos was less than 1.2 billion years old.

A study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics has identified four previously unknown primordial open cluster (OC) groups in the Milky Way.

Open clusters, loose assemblies of stars born from the same giant molecular cloud (GMC), are typically considered to form in isolation. However, the newly discovered OC groups consist of multiple member clusters originating from the same GMC, formed through sequential star formation processes.

Notably, two of these groups, labeled G1 and G2, appear to have formed via a hierarchical mechanism triggered by multiple supernova (SN) explosions.

“The new model can account for both structure formation and stability, and the key observational properties of the expansion of the universe at large, by enlisting density singularities in time that uniformly affect all space to replace conventional dark matter and dark energy,” research author Richard Lieu, a physics professor at The University of Alabama in Huntsville, said in a statement.

The dark universe is poses such a huge conundrum for scientists because it suggests that only 5% of the matter and energy in the cosmos comprises what we see around us on a day-to-day basis in stars, planets, moons, our bodies — and everything else, really.

In other words, we have no idea what the other 95% of the cosmos is.