Mystery ‘space blob’

(BBC): It might not look like much, but this image represents one of the most distant objects astronomers have ever seen, 12.9 billion light years away. It is a "Lyman-alpha blob" and is 55,000 light years across – as large as present-day galaxies. Though younger such blobs have been found, "Himiko" confounds the idea that such large objects grew more recently by the merger of smaller ones. Current cosmology models hold that between 200 million and one billion years after the Big Bang, the first colossal stars formed, emitting radiation that stripped light elements of their electrons and turned the Universe into a soup of charged particles.

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