With these observations, astronomers can see how the first galaxies took shape and how these ionised the neutral hydrogen that permeated the universe, making it transparent again to the electromagnetic radiation of the period known as "the era of reionisation". This is the first time that such super detailed measurements have identified structures of gas, dust and stars within celestial objects so far away. The international team of astronomers who conducted the research, including a number of Italians and people from the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), was led by Roberto Maiolino of the Cavendish Laboratory and Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge. The discovery came from observations made with ALMA, which searched for faint ionised carbon emissions from distant gas clouds in which new stars were forming. The aim was to study the interaction between the generation of young stars and clusters of cold gas from which the first galaxies were forming, whose radiation helped reionise the universe. ALMA managed to pick up the weak signal produced by carbon in one of these galaxies, BDF2399, and also to recognise that its origin was not in the centre of the galaxy, but in a peripheral area. "This is the identification of the most distant signal produced by carbon in a 'normal' galaxy, less than a billion years after the Big Bang," said Andrea Ferrara, of the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa and a member of the Board of Directors of INAF, who worked on the study published today in the Royal Astronomical Society journal Monthly Notices. "This result gives us the opportunity to observe the process of formation of the first galaxies. For the first time we are seeing early galaxies not as indistinct masses of matter, but as objects with an internal structure," he added. (AGI)