This isn't your typical story about a galaxy from a long time ago that's also far, far away.
Astronomers have spotted 39 enormous galaxies that are billions of light-years away from Earth, creating large numbers of stars the size of our Sun.
They've also identified several other celestial objects previously unknown to humanity.
“This is the first time that such a large population of massive galaxies was confirmed during the first 2 billion years of the 13.7-billion-year life of the universe.
These were previously invisible to us,” said researcher Tao Wang in a statement.
“This finding contravenes current models for that period of cosmic evolution and will help to add some details, which have been missing until now.”
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has provided scientists with some incredible photographs of the distant universe, but it can't see Populations of galaxies from the very early universe are invisible to Hubble "eyes", so spotting them requires a different set of peepers.
An international collaboration of researchers have used the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile as those eyes, looking back at the early universe and finding ancient galaxies that could reveal more about the nature of dark matter and supermassive black holes.
The research, published in the journal Nature on Aug. 7, found 39 ancient, huge galaxies from around 2 billion years after the dawn of the universe which aren't bright enough to see in the visible light spectrum.
By using ALMA and NASA's Spitzer space telescope, which observe the universe in infrared wavelengths, the research team were able to confirm the existence of the galaxies they suspected were hiding out at the farthest edges of the cosmos.
"The light from these galaxies is very faint with long wavelengths invisible to our eyes and undetectable by Hubble," explained Kotaro Kohno, a co-author on the paper and researcher at the University of Tokyo, in a press release.
On top of that, they are incredibly dusty, huge galaxies, which obscures them from Hubble's view.
