Astronomers have detected carbon in a galaxy observed just 350m years after the big bang, in observations that raise the possibility that the conditions for life were present almost from the dawn of time.
The observations, made by the James Webb space telescope, suggest that vast amounts of carbon were released when the first generation of stars exploded in supernovae. Carbon is known to have seeded the first planets and is a building block for life as we know it, but was previously thought to have emerged much later in cosmic history.
