There is something wildly generous about a garden where the first flowers don't just bloom but immediately scatter their seeds far beyond the fence. Something similar was happening in the young universe. Galaxies that formed just 500–700 million years after the big bang were already wrapped in gas brimming with carbon, silicon, and oxygen — elements forged only inside stars.

This gas is blasting outward at colossal speeds — up to 250 kilometers per second. If a jet flew that fast, it would zip from New York to London in under half a minute. Using the NIRSpec instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers captured light from three galaxies at the edge of the visible universe. In the spectrum of that light, a sort of rainbow strip, they found dark gaps. These were carved by atoms of various elements absorbing light at very specific wavelengths. All the gaps were shifted toward the blue end, which happens when a gas cloud is flying straight toward us.

What's more, the gas contained both neutral atoms and ions with varying degrees of charge — from oxygen that had lost one electron to carbon that had shed three. Such a mix cannot arise in a calm cloud. It resembles a cocktail of steam, water, and ice that would result if you boiled a kettle and immediately hurled its contents into freezing air. That is exactly how matter behaves when it has been ejected by exploding massive stars and accelerated by their radiation.

This discovery suggests that within the first few hundred million years after the big bang, some galaxies were already running a full-fledged matter cycle: stars were born, fused hydrogen and helium into heavier elements, and then returned them to intergalactic space. Such an early start for 'metal factories' speeds up all subsequent evolution — because enriched gas forms new stars and planets more quickly. The seeds scattered from those first cosmic gardens gave rise to everything we see today.