The Sacale of the Universe

Black hole shines a light on dark galaxies

According to our best models, the early Universe was filled with clouds of gas that were the source of its current galaxies. However, not all of these protogalactic nebulas were massive enough to compress their gas sufficiently to make stars. This means a number of "dark galaxies" should exist: galaxy-sized clouds of gas with few or no stars. This lack of stars makes dark galaxies extremely hard to find, but a group of astronomers using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile have identified 12 candidates from the early days of the Universe. These results have the potential to fill in some of the observational gaps in our understanding of early galaxy formation and evolution.