Miroslava Dessauges-Zavadsky

The kitchen of a distant galaxy isn't limited to its bright disk. Around every star system, there's an invisible cloud of gas, like steam above a pot of soup. Astronomers peeked into this steam around galaxies that appear as they were just one and a half billion years after the Big Bang.

The light from two galaxies, caught by the James Webb telescope, traveled 13 billion years to us, beginning just 600 million years after the Big Bang. Breaking this light into colors (spectral analysis), astronomers saw not just distant galaxies but true lighthouses: within them blazed giant stars.

The early Universe is often imagined as a nursery: most galaxies there are amorphous blobs, rowdy and irregular, choking on gas and bursts of star formation.