Yoichi Tamura

The night sky is full of deceptive lights. Astronomers were searching for galaxies that ignited in the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang: their light has traveled to us for nearly 13 billion years. Six faint smudges were selected from images taken by the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes.

A filament of the cosmic web stretches through the young universe, and strung along it like beads on a necklace are galaxies. In the core of the SSA22 protocluster, which in a few billion years will become the center of a massive cluster, these beads are still hot and dusty: stars are being born inside them, and cold gas serves as fuel.