Uncovering the mystery of early massive galaxies running on empty

Early massive galaxies--those that formed in the 3 billion years following the Big Bang--should have contained large amounts of cold hydrogen gas, the fuel required to make stars. But scientists observing the early universe with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Hubble Space Telescope have spotted something strange: a half-dozen early massive galaxies that ran out of fuel. The results of the research are published today in Nature.