From lighting up molecular clouds to lighting up galaxies, the European Astronomical Society took things one step further and lit up the universe. To be fair, I think this release was coincident with the holidays but not correlated in any way. 

In a new research paper appearing in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society with lead author Romain Meyer, researchers announce the discovery of a massive galaxy shining bright just 800 million years after the Big Bang, and they can see how it is a beacon of ionizing radiation that is reionizing a large bubble of the universe around itself. This discovery allows us to better understand how the universe went from neutral gas and reionized and thus became transparent after a several-hundred-million-years dark age in our early universe. It had been thought that either numerous small galaxies lit up, each ionizing a small region around themselves, or that massive systems illuminated massive regions, and of course, a mix of these options is an option itself. This detection indicates that a few bright systems likely emitted most of the ionizing photons, and are responsible for reionizing the universe and ending those cosmic dark ages.

More Information

European Astronomical Society press release 

“Double-Peaked Lyman-Alpha Emission at z = 6.803: A Reionisation-Era Galaxy Self-Ionising Its Local H II Bubble,” Romain Meyer (University College London), Nicolas Laporte (Kavli Institute for Cosmology / Cavendish Laboratory Cambridge), Richard S. Ellis (University College London), Anne Verhamme (Observatoire de Geneve, Geneva, Switzerland + Univ. Lyon1, ENS de Lyon, CNRS, France), Thibault Garel (Observatoire de Geneve, Geneva, Switzerland + Univ. Lyon1, ENS de Lyon, CNRS, France). The paper has been submitted to Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.