M. Castellano

In Euclid's deep fields, stars flare up that were not in any catalog. A telescope built to map dark matter has worked like a camera trap: one frame, and a cosmic explosion is already on record.

Imagine a city where streetlights shine, but their glow isn't scattered by fog — instead, it streams into the sky almost entirely. That's what galaxy U37126 looks like, as seen by astronomers in the early universe with the James Webb Space Telescope. Its light has traveled for more than 13 billion years to reach us.

The Universe was born in the Big Bang and almost instantly passed through a phase of inflation — an ultra-fast expansion that blew up microscopic regions to cosmological scales.