Livia Vallini

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 at 700 million years old was a noisy construction site, just beginning to light up. Telescopes caught a signal from that distant epoch: the galaxy REBELS-25, massive and full of stellar fuel.