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Measurements of the anisotropy power spectrum of the cosmic near-infrared background radiation show the clustering amplitude to be larger than existing model predictions involving distant primordial galaxies or nearby faint galaxies: the fluctuations are proposed to originate from intrahalo stars of all galaxies with dark-matter haloes of 10⁹ to 10¹² solar masses at redshifts of about 1 to 4.

The extragalactic background light at far-infrared wavelengths comes from optically faint, dusty, star-forming galaxies with star formation rates at the level of a few hundred solar masses per year. These faint submillimetre galaxies are challenging to study individually, but their average properties can be studied using statistics such as the angular power spectrum of the background intensity variations. This study reports excess clustering over the linear prediction at arcminute angular scales in the power spectrum of brightness fluctuations at 250, 350 and 500 micrometres. It is found that submillimetre galaxies are located in dark matter haloes with a minimum mass of log₁₀[M_min/solar mass]=11.5^+0.7_-0.2 at 350° micrometres.

An observation of a rare merger of two massive submillimetre bright galaxies that is forming stars at an unexpectedly high rate of 2,000 solar masses a year shows that such mergers can indeed form the most massive elliptical galaxies by about redshift 1.5.

The luminosity of ultraviolet light emitted by the first galaxies in the universe traces the formation and evolution of stars and galaxies which led to the epoch of reionization. Here the authors use data from the Hubble Space Telescope and through a model provide a bound for the total luminosity.

New measurements of the metallicities of ultraluminous infrared galaxies show that observations of underabundances of metals in these galaxies are most probably due to heavy dust obscuration, rather than intrinsic metal-poor gas accretion.

A substantial population of previously unknown massive dusty galaxies during the first two billion years after the Big Bang have been identified with submillimetre observations. They may solve some outstanding puzzles related to the formation and evolution of most massive galaxies in the Universe today.

A quadrillion previously unnoticed small bodies beyond Neptune have been spotted as they dimmed X-rays from a distant source. Models of the dynamics of debris in the Solar System's suburbs must now be reworked.

The cosmic optical background is an important cosmological observable. Here the authors show that a direct observation of the background brightness from the outer solar system can be obtained by the LORRI instrument aboard the New Horizons mission, on the basis of data acquired between Jupiter and Uranus.

The Origins Space Telescope, one of four large Mission Concept Studies sponsored by NASA for review in the 2020 US Astrophysics Decadal Survey, will open unprecedented discovery space in the infrared, unveiling our cosmic origins.

This paper reports the detection of a high-redshift galaxy that may be more representative of ‘normal’ star-forming galaxies formed in the first billion years of the Universe than the extreme starbursts discovered to date.