Webb Telescope Spots One of the Earliest Galaxies, Tracing the First Stars

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers captured LAP1-B, one of the universe’s earliest and faint galaxies, dating to about 13 billion years ago (roughly 800 million years after the Big Bang). Gravitational lensing by a foreground cluster amplified its light ~100x, enabling spectroscopy that reveals extremely low metal content and signatures of Population III stars, including a high carbon-to-oxygen ratio. The data also suggest the galaxy sits in a massive dark matter halo, offering critical clues about how the first galaxies formed and evolved in the early cosmos (Nature).