About 15 billion years ago our young universe was just beginning to change. While light from the most distant stars takes about 10 billion years to reach us, if we could look back beyond that time we would be able to catch a glimpse of the universe when the first massive stars began to form — a turbulent time filled with gigantic black holes that devoured everything around them. To give astronomers an insight into this violent period of our universe's history ESA plans to launch a permanent X-ray observatory known as XEUS (X-ray Evolving Universe Spectroscopy).
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