The blurry, confusing image you see below
might not seem all that interesting at first glance, but it’s actually an
incredible glimpse into the early days of the universe. What you’re looking at
is 14 individual galaxies on a collision course with each other. The resulting
mass of stars and planets that will form from these huge bodies will be almost
unimaginably large.
I say that in the future tense, but in reality
the huge galaxy cluster that resulted from this incredible crash already
happened a long, long time ago. Astronomers captured this image using the
Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile, and the galaxies you see
are so far away that the light that we’re seeing from them today was actually produced
over 12 billion years ago. At that point, the universe was only 1.4 billion
years old, and whatever massive conglomeration that the galaxies ended up
creating has existed for billions and billions of years already.

By looking at far-off objects, astronomers can
essentially look back in time, seeing what galaxies and star clusters looked
like millions, or in this case billions, of years ago. The “cosmic pileup” that
the researchers were able to observe in this particular case may be one of many
waiting to be discovered.
“How this assembly of galaxies got so big so
fast is a mystery,” says Tim Miller of Yale University, the lead author of a
paper on the findings which was published in Nature. “It wasn’t built up gradually
over billions of years, as astronomers might expect. This discovery provides a
great opportunity to study how massive galaxies came together to build enormous
galaxy clusters.”
All previous models of how the universe
evolved over time suggest that huge collection of galaxies like this should
only have formed much later, and certainly not as early as 1.4 billion years
after the big bang. Explaining exactly how such a huge cluster could have even
existed at that point in time will be the next challenge for researchers. For
now, however, we can enjoy the fact that that modern technology has delivered
such a stunning window into the universe’s past.
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