The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has detected a key building block of life at the dawn of the universe, upending what we know about the first galaxies.
The discovery — a cloud of carbon in a distant and compact galaxy as it appeared just 350 million years after the Big Bang — marks the earliest detection of an element other than hydrogen in the universe. The results have been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, and a preprint version can be found on arXiv.
