A team of astronomers peered out deep into the universe and found mind-bending massive galaxies that appear to impossibly exist.
Published in the Astrophysical Journal, the new study detailed a class of distant, massive galaxies spotted with the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) at the ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile.
"We uncovered 574 new massive galaxies - the largest sample of such hidden galaxies in the early Universe ever assembled," research leader Karina Caputi, of the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute at the University of Groningen, said in an European Southern Observatory (ESO) press release. "Studying them allows us to answer a simple but important question: when did the first massive galaxies appear?"
Due to the nature of the universe, objects that are farther away are older because the light they emit takes longer to reach our view from Earth. These newly discovered massive galaxies may force astronomers to change the way they think the first of their kind formed.
For further observation, researchers will seek out this class of massive galaxies with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array telescope.
"We found no evidence of these massive galaxies earlier than around one billion years after the Big Bang," Henry Joy McCracken, a co-author on the paper, said in the release, "so we're confident that this is when the first massive galaxies must have formed."
