Astronomers may finally have laid eyes on a population of enormous but elusive galaxies in the early universe.
These hefty, star-forming galaxies are shrouded in dust, which hid them from previous searches that used starlight. Now observations of radiation emitted by that interstellar dust have revealed dozens of massive, active galaxies from when the universe was younger than 2 billion years, researchers report online August 7 in Nature. These galaxies may be the long-sought precursors to heavyweight galaxies seen later in the universe’s history, as well as the most massive galaxies around today.