Zhiyuan Ji

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.

In the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang, the cosmos was like a noisy teen club: galaxies flared up, collided, and churned out stars by the hundreds.

There is something wildly generous about a garden where the first flowers don't just bloom but immediately scatter their seeds far beyond the fence. Something similar was happening in the young universe.

Right after the Big Bang, the Universe was a chemical desert — only hydrogen and helium, not a hint of metals. But moments passed (by cosmic standards), and the birth of the first stars — Population III — began.

In the deep field of JWST, among thousands of galaxies, astronomers zoomed in on the source JADES-GS 209777 – and saw a cosmic chick. Its "shell" is a thick cocoon of gas and cosmic dust that long hid the growing black hole at its center. But at a redshift of 3,711 (1,8 billion years after the Big Bang), the shell began to crack.