NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed that some of the Universe’s earliest galaxies were brighter than expected. The excess light is a by-product of the galaxies releasing incredibly high amounts of ionizing radiation. The finding offers clues to the cause of the Epoch of Reionisation, a major cosmic event that transformed the universe from being mostly opaque to the brilliant starscape seen today. The new work appears in a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Source: EurekaAlert, https://www.eurekalert.org