The observations came as a shock—something like finding baby
pictures of your father and seeing that he sported a mustache at
age 2. When he examined galaxies in the distant early universe,
astronomer Roberto Abraham of the University of Toronto found
they were far more mature than expected. “Stars are forming in
some way that is inconsistent with our view of how they should
be forming,” he says. Abraham’s team used the huge Gemini North
telescope in Hawaii to search for extremely remote, old-looking
galaxies whose reddish glow would have been largely blotted out
by Earth’s atmosphere. After 120 hours of observing, the
researchers detected more than 300 distant galaxies. Based on
the objects’ size and color, many of them formed just 1 billion
years after the Big Bang, far sooner than current models
predict. Meanwhile, Povilas Palunas of the University of Texas
at Austin and his colleagues have detected a huge clumping of
galaxies at an even earlier era. Theorists believe that dark
matter provided the gravitat