Roberto Abraham is a detective whose mystery has no end: it's the mystery of the universe itself. A year ago, when the award-winning University of Toronto astronomer scanned the outer reaches of the universe on a powerful Hawaiian-based telescope, he was expecting to confirm what most scientists took for granted: that big, mature galaxies in that ancient area of "deep deep" space were virtually non-existent. Instead, Abraham and his team made a stunning discovery, that large elliptical galaxies existed much earlier than anyone suspected, a sign that the early universe matured more quickly than believed. "Nobody was more surprised than I was," says Abraham, who recently presented his landmark discovery to the American Astronomical Society in Atlanta. It's a find that has turned accepted wisdom on its head, challenging the current theory of the evolution of the universe, that the first mature galaxies didn't form for some six billion years after the Big Bang explosion that set the universe in motion 13.7 billion years ago.

Instead they were created only three to six billion years after the cataclysm."The theory was that you make (mature) galaxies gradually, over a period of time, by the crashing of other little galaxies. Then they build up from there," he says.


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