For the first time, astronomers have directly detected dust in a galaxy that shouldn't have been there in the first place. In their report published in Nature on Monday, scientists said that despite the tiny A1689-zD1 being created only 700 million years or so after the Big Bang, the galaxy was too dusty for its young age.

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), Darach Watson (University of Copenhagen, Denmark), along with colleagues explored the galaxy A1689-zD1, which had earlier featured in images by the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes. Combining ALMA's capabilities with the Very Large Telescope's (VLT) optical observations allowed the astronomers to probe deeper into the galaxy's properties.

According to scientists, dust can gather rapidly in bigger galaxies that contain a large number of massive, short-lived stars, due to the violent explosion of giant stars that turn into supernovae within a few million years of their birth. In the case of smaller galaxies, a majority of the dust is usually created by the comparatively more gentle deaths of smaller stars that can go on to live for billions of years.

While dust plays an important role in the formation of planets and other solid material, there was initially no dust when the cosmos was created and the universe was comprised of just hydrogen and helium gas after the Big Bang.

Although the universe was not exactly dust free when the galaxy A1689-zD1 began existing, a majority of that dust should have formed in large, bright galaxies with a greater number of stars and not in the A1689-zD1 because it is relatively smaller and dimmer.

Besides finding much more than the usual amount of cosmic dust in the A1689-zD1, astronomers also found the galaxy emitting more radiation in the far infrared, indicating that it had already completed producing most of its stars within a period of just 700 million years after the Big Bang.

These findings suggest that early galaxies could have evolved at a much more rapid pace than previously believed and the galaxy A1689-zD1 may have begun forming stars soon after the universe came into existence.