Volker Bromm

The James Webb Space Telescope spotted galaxy Abell 2744-QSO1, which has almost no heavy elements (astronomers call them metals), and its central black hole weighs hundreds of times more than all its stars combined. Standard scenarios can't explain this imbalance.

The James Webb Space Telescope spotted bright points of light from an era just 100–300 million years after the Big Bang. At first they were taken for distant galaxies, but now a hypothesis suggests they might be lone fireworks — explosions of the very first stars.

A massive galaxy cluster acts as a giant lens. Its gravity warps the fabric of space, and the light of distant objects, bending around this curvature, is amplified and split into multiple images.

Thanks to gravitational lens — an effect predicted by Fritz Zwicky, where a galaxy cluster acts like a magnifying glass — the James Webb Space Telescope spotted two red dots in a galaxy 800 million years after the Big Bang.

Imagine a city where a skyscraper and a huge park are being built at the same time. The skyscraper grows upward, and the park expands outward. Both processes are fast and get in each other's way, but in the end they are meant to become a single whole. That's the situation in galaxy GNz7q: a black hole grows at the center while new stars burst to life around it.

400 million years after the Big Bang, the James Webb Space Telescope noticed a bright spot near the galaxy GN-z11 — like a distant lighthouse whose light pushed through the primordial darkness.

Immediately after the Big Bang, an idea championed by Georges Lemaître, the cosmos was a dark broth of hydrogen and helium. Then the first stars ignited — enormous, dazzlingly bright and hot, like sparks from a cosmic bonfire.

A bonfire built of pure alcohol burns hot and gives off almost no smoke. That's roughly how the first stars shone: they contained no heavy elements, only hydrogen and helium left over from the Big Bang. The James Webb Space Telescope may have caught one such "bonfire" in the galaxy GN-z11.