Extraordinary images captured by Hubble Space Telescope and ALMA observatory—utilizing unique natural gravitational lensing—revealed a remarkable phenomenon which occurred in space 11 billion years ago. Early in the life of the universe, when it was just 3 billion years old and stars were forming abundantly, a cluster of galaxies mysteriously died out and stopped producing stars for some unknown reason. The recent telescopic images released by NASA show six of these so-called “dead” galaxies which “lived fast and died young,” perhaps literally running out of the cold hydrogen gas needed to make stars, although other reasons fielded by researchers are also plausible. “At this point in our universe, all galaxies should be forming lots of stars. It’s the peak epoch of star formation,” said Kate Whitaker, study author and assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “So what happened to all the cold gas in these galaxies so early on?” Other explanations …