Astronomers have used the light from a distant quasar to discover a metal-rich hydrogen cloud that would have otherwise been invisible; the quasar is 9 billion light-years away, but the cloud is only 6.3 billion light-years away. By analyzing the spectrum of this galaxy, astronomers have discovered that it contains 4 times more metal than what’s contained in our Sun. If more of these clouds are discovered, it might help account for why the Universe seems to contain less metal that cosmologists have predicted it should.