Karl Glazebrook

The night of March 4, 2024. The MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa catches a millisecond pulse: a fast radio burst coming from a depth of 17.4 gigaparsecs. This is light that traveled 10.5 billion years to reach Earth.

Galaxies are like giant kitchens where, in stellar cores, light atoms are fused into heavy ones — much like flour and water becoming bread. When a star dies, it spills its accumulated riches into the interstellar gas, seasoning it with 'spices': oxygen, carbon, iron.

A distant red object usually means one thing: we're seeing a dust veil over a scorching disk falling into a black hole. But when the James Webb split its light into shades, a shadow appeared inside — just like steam from boiling water intercepts rays.

A dense fog, through which only occasional headlight beams pierce. So it was in the early universe: young galaxies were wrapped in clouds of neutral hydrogen, which eagerly absorbed ultraviolet light. But sometimes gaps appeared in this shroud, and ionizing radiation burst out, making the cosmos transparent.

The first two billion years after the Big Bang were an era when the universe resembled a boiling construction pit. Dark matter clumped the gas together, igniting the first stars. It seemed there simply wasn't enough time to assemble massive elliptical galaxies—'dormant' stellar metropolises — from this raw material.

The potter’s wheel of the cosmos spins faster than we imagined. Look at galaxy UDS 12999: its light traveled 7.6 billion years, but James Webb discerned a perfectly cast X-shaped bulge already at its center. This is no mere pattern: it’s the fingerprint of a mighty stellar bar that, like a potter, stretched and molded the central region.

When we peer deep into space, we see the past. Edwin Hubble’s law turns redshift into a time machine: light from galaxy UDS 12999 traveled to us for 7.6 billion years — more than half the age of the Universe.

In the first half-billion years after the Big Bang, galaxies grew like crazy. Gas fell in rapidly and collapsed into stars without any resistance. This period is called 'unimpeded star formation.' It's like frying pancakes on a scorching skillet without a lid: splatters fly, but nothing holds them back.

In the dense galaxy cluster Abell 2744, where gravity bends light like a lens, the James Webb Space Telescope spotted a new point of light. It appeared in images from 2023 and then began to change brightness. It was a supernova, the explosion of a dying star, but not just any kind: a Type IIP.