You may not spend a lot of time outside at night looking up at the sky for various reasons - knife crime, Downton Abbey or light pollution for example.
Thankfully, the Europen Southern Observatory do it for you, pointing their Very Large Telescope at the sky as often as they can, finding extraordinarily rare spectacles such as these two ancient galaxies.
The ESO have just spotted a distant gamma-ray burst which revealed two galaxies that are richer in heavier chemical elements than the Sun. And here we were thinking everything revolved around that star.
Gamma-ray bursts are the brightest explosions in the Universe [1]. Brighter than the lights at Wembley, and scientifically proven to be brighter than sunshine on a hungover Sunday.
The galaxies spotted in this shot are a particularly rare find because they're extremely distant. We see them as they were about 12 billion years ago.
Sandra Savaglio from Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, Germany is the lead author of the paper describing the new results. She said: “These galaxies have more heavy elements than have ever been seen in a galaxy so early in the evolution of the Universe. We didn't expect the Universe to be so mature, so chemically evolved, so early on.”
"We were very lucky to observe GRB 090323 when it was still sufficiently bright, so that it was possible to obtain spectacularly detailed observations with the VLT. Gamma-ray bursts only stay bright for a very short time and getting good quality data is very hard. We hope to observe these galaxies again in the future when we have much more sensitive instruments, they would make perfect targets for the E-ELT," she added.