An international team led by researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of La Laguna (ULL) has discovered one of the brightest “non-active” galaxies in the early universe. Finding BG1429+1202 was made possible by the “help” of a massive elliptical galaxy along the line of sight to the object, which acted as a kind of lens, amplifying the brightness and distorting the observed image. The results, published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, are part of the BELLS GALLERY project, based on the analysis of one and a half million spectra of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).