The ALMA telescope of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has helped astronomers to observe for the very first time how galaxies were formed in the early days of the universe. The astronomers in Chile made attempts to detect the earliest galaxies that had formed after the Big Bang.

ALMA is the largest telescope array in the world, and the astronomers led by Roberto Maiolinio, from the University of Cambridge, used it with a different approach to compete the task. They did not look for the light from stars, instead focused on the faint glow of ionized carbon. This carbon was emitted from gas clouds within which stars form.

This made it possible for the researchers to understand how newly created stars are related to the clumps that would go on to become the first galaxies.

"This is the most distant detection ever of this kind of emission from a normal galaxy, seen less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang. It gives us the opportunity to watch the build-up of the first galaxies", said Andrea Ferrara, co- author of an article about the discovery published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

He added that their stint helped them become the first scientists to see early galaxies as objects with internal structure, not simply as tiny blobs.

The astronomers wanted to detect galaxies that were not easy to notice and were not ordinary ones. These were the galaxies that re-ionized the universe and set the platform for most of the galaxies seen today.