Astronomers have seen their best glimpse yet of stars forming in the early Universe.

The ALMA radio telescope in Chile explored the SDP.81 galaxy, which is 3.6 billion parsecs (11.7 billion light years) away from Earth. Its light was magnified and distorted by the gravitational pull of another galaxy between it and Earth, but a model developed by Yoichi Tamura of the University of Tokyo and his team corrected the distortions. Their images reveal many cold clouds of dust and gas that are driving a rapid rate of star formation.

Several research teams have analysed the ALMA data to characterize other aspects of this galaxy.

Publ. Astron. Soc. Japan http://doi.org/5bv (2015)