About 100 years ago, our galaxy was thought to encompass the entire universe. A century later, we’re observing things more than 13 billion light-years away, nearing the moment of creation.

These following 10 discoveries come from the actual edge of existence. They show us just how much the early universe was a surprisingly happenin’ and amazing place.

10 A Galaxy From The Beginning Of Time

The beloved Hubble Telescope stole an image from the birth of the universe, just 400 million years after the big bang. It captured the bright infant galaxy GN-z11 as it was a whopping 13.4 billion years ago.

At this point, the universe was only 3 percent of its current age and just a few hundred million years had passed since the first stars burst into life.^[1]

GN-z11 probably grew into a proper beast. But here it only had 1 percent of the Milky Way’s mass in stars packed into a structure 25 times smaller than our galaxy.

9 Colliding Starburst Galaxies

Superluminous starburst galaxies shine stupendously with the birth of countless massive blue stars. They’re a rarity, but astronomers just spotted two of them colliding right on the big bang’s doorstep 12.7 billion years ago.

The swirling, bi-galactic entity is about 12.8 billion light-years away and known as ADFS-27. Each of its components is a dozen times larger than the 100,000 light-year-wide Milky Way.

Separated by 30,000 light-years, the two bodies are zooming at hundreds of kilometers per second relative to one another, setting up a crazier merger than anything yet witnessed.

The resulting elliptical mega-monster will probably be substantial enough to establish an entire galaxy cluster, snagging hundreds of thousands of other galaxies with its gravitational might.^[2]

8 The Most Ancient Black Holes

Scientists scanning the early universe for quasars have just come up with a bunch, confirming 83 new black holes to supplement the 17 known to exist during this era.

These things are millions or billions of times more massive than our Sun. They were already thriving when the universe was less than 10 percent of its current age, just 800 million years after the big bang.

Researchers calculated that if you took these known quasars and parceled the universe into cubes, each a billion light-years per side, every cube would get one black hole, accounting for one black hole per “giga-light-year.”^[3]

7 Fat And Dusty Galaxies

The gargantuan galaxies of the big bang era are saturated with dust and debris and can emit the radiation of a trillion Suns. But they’re invisible because their light is absorbed by all that dust and reemitted at submillimeter wavelengths.

With abundant materials and few bodies to gobble them up, researchers pinpointed a structure that was exceptionally fat and dusty. The galaxy possesses a whopping gas mass of 330 billion solar masses. Comparatively, the Milky Way only has a gas mass of five billion solar masses because most of its mass is already locked away in stars.^[4]

6 Whirlpool Galaxies At The Edge Of Space

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) is so finely tuned that it peered through 94 percent of the universe and detected the rotation of two fetal galaxies.

They’re some of the oldest galaxies on record and five times smaller than the Milky Way, according to the ALMA snapshot that captured them as they were 800 million years after the big bang. Even though the view is nearly 13 billion years old, its color gradients indicate the motion of the gas and the galaxies’ rotation.^[5]

Like modern galaxies, they swirl like whirlpools, birthing from that chaos thousands of stars per year. They’re surprisingly ordered, say researchers who marvel at how quickly the universe organized its resources and propagated itself.

5 The Earliest Black Holes Were Surprisingly Monstrous

A fortuitously positioned, six-billion-light-year-distant galaxy acted as a cosmic magnifying lens, redirecting and amplifying some of the oldest photons in existence.

Those photons were expelled by quasar J0439+1634, which (thanks to the lens effect) appears 50 times brighter and lights up the early cosmos with the apparent light of 600 trillion Suns.

The quasar-powering black hole contains the mass of 700 million Suns and dates to 12.8 billion years ago. During this Epoch of Reionization, the first light sources pierced the opaque hydrogen and helium fog that cloaked the young universe.^[6]

4 A ‘Fossil Gas Cloud’

The universe is a big witch’s pot of chemicals, and there’s generally a lot of mixing going on. So, heavy elements are seemingly everywhere, but scientists have identified a pristine relic fossil gas cloud.

It’s only the third relic gas cloud discovered so far discovered, and it managed to remain uncontaminated even 1.5 billion years after the big bang. It’s also supremely wispy, indicative of its status as a primeval puff from the earliest days of existence.^[7]

Like a fluffy, cosmic 3 Musketeers bar, it has a proportion of heavy elements less than 1/10,000th that of the Sun. That must mean that it’s a leftover from a far-gone era in which stars hadn’t yet pumped out heavy elements like metals.

3 An Unexpected Twist On A Star With Two Planets

Astronomers found a souvenir from the beginning of time that was only 375 light-years away. HIP 11952 is a star full of hydrogen and helium but very much lacking in metals. Such a star could only exist at the dawn of the universe.

With an age of around 12.8 billion years, it formed when our Milky Way “was still a baby.” In 2012, scientists were shocked to discover that the star was harboring something even more amazing—two incredibly ancient planets.

Scientists are debating the origin of planets during the days of the first stars as planets may not have been able to form with the lack of heavy elements. They thought that the discovery of HIP 11952 was painting a clearer picture of when the first planets were finally able to form.

But then the story took an unexpected twist. Using the new high-resolution spectrograph HARPS-N at the Galileo National Telescope in Spain, astrophysicists took more measurements of HIP 11952 over a 150-day period from August 2012 to January 2013.

Instead of detecting two giant planets in the system, they found . . . nothing. Ultimately, they concluded that the previous discoveries of two ancient planets had been incorrect and occurred due to instrument errors.^[8]

2 A Stupendously Bright Quasar

P352-15 is the early universe’s brightest radio quasar by a factor of 10. It looks like three orange splotches, but those splotches reveal a 5,000-light-year-wide galaxy as it appeared 13 billion years ago. Though the universe was less than a billion years old, P352-15 is already a quasar with a supermassive black hole vomiting radiation at relativistic speeds.

That spewing, supermassive monster probably resides in one of the splotches on either side. The two blots opposing it are actually huge, lethal jets being ejected at near-light-speeds from the maw of a feasting black hole.^[9]

1 A Galaxy Full Of Old Stars

Astronomers have recently detected the faint wisp of ionized oxygen across 13.3 billion light-years of space.

It belongs to galaxy MACS1149-JD1, and it’s extremely red because the light has been stretched during an epic journey that began just 500 million years after the big bang. The existence of oxygen means that MACS1149-JD1’s stars had been shining for a long time—long enough to have produced said oxygen.

Not only that, but MACS1149-JD1 is already full of mature stars. Astronomers say these stars were shining just 250 million years after the big bang, a period not too distant from the birth of the very first stars.^[10]

Ivan writes about cool things for the Internet. You can contact him at [email protected].

Professional sports are highly competitive and feature the very best athletes and coaches from all over the world. The stakes are often quite high, as there is a great deal of turnover among coaches, executives, and players if success is not achieved very quickly. It’s no surprise then that professional sports teams are constantly on the lookout for any edge they can find to beat their opponents. What follows are 10 of the strangest ways pro sports teams try to gain an advantage.

10Using Facial Coding

Psychologists have been using facial coding to determine how a facial expression may betray an emotion, and animators have used facial coding to ensure that their characters possess realistic facial expressions. The Milwaukee Bucks, however, have turned to a facial coding expert in order to help evaluate the emotional stability of a player who may ultimately receive a multimillion-dollar contract.

The Bucks hired Dan Hill, a facial coding expert, for the evaluation process related to the NBA draft. With the help of Hill’s analysis, the team decided that Jabari Parker had the emotional wherewithal to be successful in the NBA, whereas another player, Dante Exum, might not hold up emotionally. The facial coding analysis played a significant role in their selection of Parker over Exum. The Bucks—along with other pro sports teams—are now analyzing “emotion metrics” in order to gain a better understanding of their players so that the team can get the most out of them from a performance standpoint.

9Employing ‘V Energy’

Fans of the Los Angeles Dodgers were understandably frustrated with the direction of the franchise under then-owner Frank McCourt, whose divorce proceedings revealed some of the financial mismanagement that had caused the Dodgers to have disappointing seasons during his reign.

One of the oddest things done by the McCourt regime was the use of “V energy,” for which the Dodgers paid a Russian scientist-turned-healer a six-figure salary. Vladimir Shpunt, living in Boston, was on the Los Angeles Dodgers payroll to send positive energy to the team from across the country.

Shpunt, who admittedly knew nothing about baseball, emigrated to the United States with the help of future Nobel prize winner Zhores Alferov, a physicist who stated that Shpunt was an “eminent scientist” and “outstanding inventor.” So for five years, Shpunt was paid a considerable sum to send positive energy to the Dodgers, and he was even asked to treat a player, Jayson Werth. The “V energy” did not work for Werth, and it is difficult to believe that it ever worked for the Dodgers, either. The team was, however, clearly committed to exhausting every available option in order to win a World Series title.

8Zen Teachings And Meditation

There have been many interesting coach/player pairings in the history of sports, but Phil Jackson and Shaquille O’Neal must have been a true joy to watch. O’Neal, now a commentator for TNT, has talked about Jackson’s triangle offense quite a bit, but one of the more interesting aspects of Jackson’s sessions has to be his use of meditation during practice, a tactic he employed with both the Chicago Bulls and the Los Angeles Lakers. On occasion with the Bulls, Jackson also had the team practice in the absence of light and in the absence of sound.

Jackson was also well known for giving out books to his players as gifts, usually because the book contained a lesson that was particularly appropriate for the player. Jackson once gave O’Neal a copy of the book Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, and then jokingly asked the jovial big man to give him a book report. O’Neal obliged after reading the book, saying, “Story about a young man who’s rich, famous, good-looking, and has a lot of women—just like me.”

7Developing New And Incredibly Specific Analytics

Professional sports teams have become heavily invested in properly analyzing players, including those they currently employ and those they may target in the future. In order to completely understand a player’s value, teams have begun using advanced analytics. An NBA general manager may have once looked at a player’s points-per-game and rebound averages while also relying on scouts for further analysis, but they are now looking at things like PER (player efficiency rating), win shares, and rebound percentage (the percent of the available rebounds grabbed while the player was on the floor).

In baseball, things have gotten very specific. It was once the case that a player’s batting line (batting average, home runs, and runs batted in) was used to tell most of the story, but teams are using reams of data to determine the true value of a player. One of the more interesting developments relates to pitch framing, a metric used to determine how well a catcher “frames” a pitch. Catchers can now be judged based on how many pitches they are able to get called as strikes, regardless of whether the pitch was in the strike zone or not. The accumulated value of pitch framing is quantified by runs saved, which can be as many as 50 over the course of a single baseball season.

6Emulating And Applying Wall Street Strategies

Being able to identify undervalued assets and market inefficiencies are of vital importance to those working on Wall Street, and given the deep understanding of advanced financial strategies, many investment bankers are finding that their experience has made them a hot commodity in Major League Baseball.

Andrew Friedman, formerly of the Tampa Bay Rays and now with the Los Angeles Dodgers, is a perfect example of this. After leaving his position as an analyst at Bear Stearns to join the Rays’ front office, Friedman began applying his Wall Street strategies to turn a losing team into a small-market monster. He worked feverishly at identifying market inefficiencies that allowed him to sign players to affordable, long-term contracts, allowing him to compete with other AL East teams that carried $100 million more in payroll each season.

Friedman values the information that he and his staff utilize so greatly that new hires are required to sign a non-disclosure agreement, allowing Friedman’s front office to maintain an information advantage.

5Cultivating A ‘Happy’ Atmosphere

For many years, it has simply been accepted that participation in competitive sports is going to involve quite a bit of yelling. Perhaps not on the level of a Bobby Knight tirade, but screaming and harsh criticism are generally considered par for the course when playing for a team that has championship aspirations.

But not for the Seattle Seahawks.

Pete Carroll, the head coach of the defending Super Bowl champions, has worked very diligently to ensure that his players enjoy a happy atmosphere. Everyone in the organization is instructed to maintain a positive disposition, with Carroll pushing his players to “do your job better than it has ever been done before,” rather than chastising them when a mistake is made. The Seahawks have adopted Phil Jackson’s practice of having players meditate as a part of practice, and they have also added yoga sessions and “imagery work,” which is a part of Seattle’s Neurotopia brain-performance testing.

4CIA-Type Surveillance

Although we wrote this list before the explosion of “Deflategate,” it isn’t the first time the Patriots have been in hot water. In one of the more infamous scandals in recent NFL history, Bill Belichick and the New England Patriots were heavily fined and penalized for an incident known as “Spygate,” in which the coach and other members of the team spied on the New York Jets in order to steal their sideline signals. A Patriots intern videotaped the opposing team’s defensive signals so they could be decoded, allowing the Patriots to know exactly what the Jets were doing well before they did it.

In order to make full use of the information the team had uncovered, the Patriots also set up a hidden radio frequency through which a member of the team’s personnel could communicate with the quarterback long after the NFL’s mandated time, which prohibits communication from the sideline to the field once the play clock is down to 15 seconds. This allowed Patriot coaches to talk to quarterback Tom Brady while plays were going on, and it has been reported that the coaches were telling Brady which receivers were open on each play.

A recently published book on the subject contends that the spying has not ended, and may be the reason that the Patriots’ home record has been so strong over the years—and why so few coaches have had success after leaving New England.

3Code Breaking

Because of the ease with which NFL sideline signaling can be deciphered by opponents, many teams now take protective measures to maintain the secrecy of their calls. The Philadelphia Eagles are a bit more paranoid than others, and have gone to extreme measures to ensure that no opponent can crack their code. Chip Kelly, the Eagles’ head coach, uses multiple assistants, each holding various placards at different times while wearing a specially colored shirt, arm band, or hat.

To see just how well Kelly’s code worked, ESPN tried to crack the code using a mathematician and a team of photographers back when Kelly coached at the University of Oregon, but were unable to discern how the placards and colors related to the plays that were ultimately run. Kelly also employs a sports sciences coordinator—Shaun Huls, formerly the strength and conditioning coordinator for none other than the Navy SEALS—in order to ensure that his players are mentally and physically prepared for the demands of the Eagles’ system.

2Early Morning Concert Performances

World Cup qualifying is taken very seriously by athletes and fans alike. In many cases, helping a team to victory becomes something of a national effort. Such was the case when the Swedish national team faced off against Portugal, and the home side attempted to find every advantage it could.

They first tried to leave the roof of the arena open despite freezing temperatures and the very high likelihood of snowfall. But while keeping the arena roof open only provides a small advantage to the home team, having a concert held outside of the opposing team’s hotel and scheduled for 7:15 AM does provide a decided edge. Markoolio, a singer/songwriter, scheduled the concert in order to keep Portugal from a solid night’s rest, rapping insults in a language unfamiliar to them.

This was not the first time a stunt like this was attempted, as Algerian fans also disrupted the sleep patterns of the Burkina Faso team by blowing car horns, setting off fireworks, and using the most infernal of all noisemakers, the vuvuzela.

1Total Lack Of Hospitality

The Boston Celtics were one of the best teams of the 1980s, and Red Auerbach was one of the most innovative executives in the history of basketball. So it comes as little surprise that Auerbach ensured that the visiting locker room was as hot as a sauna and its showers were freezing cold. It got so bad that, during the 1984 NBA Finals, the Lakers furiously demanded that their locker room include an air conditioner. So Auerbach gave them one, still in its package and on the floor.

The tactic worked for the Celtics, and Game Five in Boston saw the Boston Garden reach a temperature of 36 degrees Celsius (97 °F). Larry Bird excelled, scoring 34 points and collecting 17 rebounds, all while the Lakers’ players—including all-time scoring leader Kareem Abdul Jabbar—struggled, some needing oxygen just to make it through the game. Boston won the game and the series in seven games to earn their second championship of the 1980s.

J. Francis Wolfe is a freelance writer whose work can be seen daily at Dodgers Today. When he’s not writing, he is most likely waiting for “just one more wave,” or quietly reading under a shady tree.