A. Ferrara

A street where houses have just been built. Some shine with clean windows, others are covered in construction dust. That's roughly what galaxies looked like when the universe was only a few hundred million years old. The new James Webb telescope peered into that era and saw dozens of bright star islands.

A vast city lights new streetlamps every night. But then a hurricane sweeps in, rips all the fuel from the warehouses, and the lamps go out one by one. Something similar has been spotted by astronomers in a galaxy whose light has traveled 12.5 billion years to reach us.