Scientific American is carrying this brief article summarizing new work in the field of quasar research. Quasars are hyper-energetic objects found in very distant parts of our universe. Because they're so distant, they also give us an idea of what the universe was like much earlier in its life. They were once thought to be formed from a combination of supermassive black holes and giant galaxies. However, this research seems to indicate much smaller galaxies are capable of hosting them. This has strong implications for quasar theory, and therefore cosmological theory has a whole.