Yurina Nakazato

The galaxy CEERS2-588 flared up like a bonfire fed with an armful of wood all at once. Just 400 million years after the Big Bang, it had already built up a mass of a billion suns and ignited countless stars. But then the fuel ran out, and over the last 10 million years, star formation in it has almost completely ceased.

A distant galaxy always looks redder than it really is. That's the work of cosmic dust — tiny solid particles that scatter blue light more than red, like haze at sunset. Astronomers measured this effect for tens of thousands of galaxies using two powerful instruments.