An anonymous reader writes: One of the universe’s brightest lights, a black hole-driven quasar in a nearby galaxy, recently shut off like a snuffed candle. New observations of a bizarre cloud of glowing gas, and a nearby galaxy that illuminates it, show that the galaxy’s central light went dim sometime in the last 70,000 years. The finding could reveal how supermassive black holes help galaxies grow and evolve. A new clue comes from Hannys Voorwerp, a weird cloud of glowing green gas found in Galaxy Zoo (galaxyzoo.org) archival telescope data in 2007. The Voorwerp (Dutch for object) was thought to be lit up by a nearby quasar zapping it with a floodlight-like jet of ionizing radiation.