What new discoveries are JWST making about the early universe?

JWST is helping us see what the universe looked like when it was just a baby, and it’s finding surprises we didn’t expect.

Imagine you're playing with building blocks, each block is a galaxy, and when you stack them up, that's how the universe grows. But JWST saw that in the early days, there were way more big blocks (big galaxies) than scientists thought. It’s like finding a pile of giant blocks right at the start of the game, that’s not what most people expected!

Like a Time Machine

JWST is kind of like a time machine. It looks so far into space that it sees light from when the universe was just 400 million years old, that’s like being able to watch the very first scenes of a movie, even though the whole thing hasn’t finished yet!

Surprises in the Dark

JWST also found distant stars that were burning bright way earlier than we thought. It's as if you turned on all the lights in your house before you even walked in, it’s surprising and exciting! These discoveries are helping us rewrite the story of how everything began.

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Examples

  1. The James Webb Space Telescope saw baby galaxies forming when the universe was just a few hundred million years old.
  2. It found stars that were much bigger than expected in the early universe.
  3. JWST discovered a galaxy that looked like it shouldn't exist yet.

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