Astronomers Just Found a Half-Million Light Year Long Stream in the Early Universe

Astronomers have been looking for the source of the matter that makes up early galaxies for decades. Now, for the first time, astronomers have observed the cold, steady streams of gas that make up the raw material for stars.
Despite the name, the filamentary stream surrounding and heading into the galaxy 4C 41.17— more than 10 billion light years away — is immense: a thin stream of cold carbon gas 100 kiloparsecs, or half a million light years, wide, and as massive as 140 billion suns. That’s the results found in paper published this week in Science, which resulted from an unusual use of a radio telescope.
Astronomers Just Found a Half-Million Light Year Long Stream in the Early Universe