Astronomers have spotted the glow from one of the most distant galaxies ever seen in the early Universe.

Roberto Maiolino at the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues used the high-resolution Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile to observe three faint galaxies that began forming less than one billion years after the Big Bang. In one galaxy they detected clouds of cold ionized carbon that was shifted away from the bright, star-forming centre. This matches models of early galaxy formation, which predict that active young stars disperse such clouds.

The data will help to test theories about how the Universe's first stars and galaxies formed, the team says.

Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 452, 54–68 (2015)