Ali Hadi

The kitchen of a distant galaxy isn't limited to its bright disk. Around every star system, there's an invisible cloud of gas, like steam above a pot of soup. Astronomers peeked into this steam around galaxies that appear as they were just one and a half billion years after the Big Bang.

The Universe looks like a giant spiderweb: galaxies aren't scattered randomly but are gathered into knots and along filaments. Inside the filaments, there's plenty of gas, and that's where new stars most often flare up. But how has this changed over time? Scientists compared data from a computer model with real observations of thousands of galaxies.