One of the oldest clouds of intergalactic gas found so far has a surprisingly contemporary composition, suggesting that the first stars to form after the Big Bang lived and died more quickly than thought.

Early in the history of the Universe, gas clouds birthed the first galaxies and stars. But the details of this process remain mysterious.

While observing very bright objects called quasars, a team led by Eduardo Bañados at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, stumbled on a peculiar cloud of gas that dates to just 850 million years after the Big Bang. Spectral analysis showed that the amounts of carbon and other elements in the cloud are much lower than those found in modern stars. This suggests that the cloud is made up of material from the early Universe.

But the ratios of these elements do not match the ratios that would be expected if the cloud contained remnants of the first generation of stars. Instead, the authors’ observations suggest that at least a second generation of stars had already come and gone, even at this early stage of cosmic growth.