Astronomers have discovered eight massive young galaxies within what might be a large web of dark matter.

Ordinary matter, including galaxies, is thought to have aggregated along threads of dark matter in the early Universe. But the progenitors of today's galaxies are often shrouded in clouds of dust, making it difficult for astronomers to spot them and test this theory.

Hideki Umehata at the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany, and his colleagues used the high-resolution Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile to make detailed observations of a narrow slice of the sky. They compared their results with previous surveys of the region to find the galaxies, which were more than 3.4 billion parsecs (11 billion light years) away and producing hundreds of millions of new stars each year.

The study supports the idea that big galaxies form in areas with a high concentration of dark matter.

Astrophys. J. Lett. 815, L8 (2015)