Francisco Prada

In the early universe, when it was just a few hundred thousand years old, matter had not yet gathered into stars and galaxies; it was a hot soup of particles and light. Sound waves rippled through this soup — compressions and rarefactions, like ripples from a stone thrown into water.

Light from a star travels for millions of years, yet in a telescope it still appears as a point: it's just too far away. To see a star's surface, you need an instrument the size of a city. In Chile, such a giant is already under construction: ELT with a 39-meter mirror made of 798 hexagonal segments.

A distant lamp shines through uneven glass. The glass bends the rays, and instead of one flame on the wall, several appear — some brighter, some fainter. In much the same way, a massive galaxy bends the light of an exploded star. There was one explosion, but the images show four glowing points.