Joe Cammisa

The brightest galaxies in the universe, known as submillimetre galaxies (SMGs), aren’t visible to the naked eye. But look through an infrared telescope, and they light up the sky. They are probably 12 or 13 billion years old, and what makes them so luminous is that they form stars very quickly — 1000 times faster than our Milky Way. Now researchers have the first viable model of the origins of SMGs.