Monster blob on a feeding frenzy: body may be early galaxy caught in the act of forming.

Quick, Marge, call the Cosmic Enquirer! Astronomers have discovered a monster blob lurking at the universe's edge. The blob may be the earliest known galaxy to be caught in the act of a feeding frenzy.

The giant parcel of gas and stars stretches for 55,000 light-years, a little more than half the diameter of the Milky Way's disk today. Yet this newfound object hails from a time when the universe was only 6 percent of its current age.

Masami Ouchi of the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, Calif., and his colleagues first recorded light from the blob with the infrared Subaru Telescope on Hawaii's Mauna Kea. Spectra taken at the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea and at the Magellan Telescope near La Serena, Chile, confirmed that the blob resides 12.9 billion light-years from Earth, making it the fifth most distant object known in the cosmos.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The body's distance reveals that it dates from just 800 million years after the Big Bang.

This kind of body, dubbed a Lyman-alpha blob, has never before been seen so early in the universe. Infrared observations reveal that the blob contains a stellar mass equivalent of about 35 billion suns, Ouchi and colleagues report online (arxiv.org/abs/0807.4174) and May 10 in The Astrophysical Journal.

Simulations have shown that massive galaxies early in the universe grow bigger by snaring streams of cold intergalactic gas. In an article posted online, Avi Loeb and Mark Dijkstra of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., show that these streams are likely to appear as Lyman-alpha blobs, just like the one Ouchi's team found (arxiv.org/abs/0902.2999).

"In our model, such a detection implies the formation of a massive galaxy" early in the cosmos's history, Loeb says.)