James Webb telescope confirms the earliest galaxy in the universe is bursting with way more stars than we thought possible

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has spotted the earliest galaxy ever seen, and its unusually bright light is coming from a bizarre frenzy of star formation.

Named JADES-GS-z14-0, the galaxy formed at least 290 million years after the Big Bang, and contains stars that have been bursting into life since an estimated 200 million years after our universe began. 

Spotted by JWST's Near InfraRed Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument, the Mysterious origins and rapid development of the stars has opened up some fundamental questions about how our universe came to be. The researchers published their findings July 29 in the journal Nature.

"The discovery by JWST of an abundance of luminous galaxies in the very early Universe suggests that galaxies developed rapidly, in apparent tension with many standard models," the researchers wrote in the study. "Galaxy formation models will need to address the existence of such large and luminous galaxies so early in cosmic History."

Astronomers aren't certain when the very first globules of stars began to clump into the galaxies we see today, but cosmologists previously estimated that the process began slowly within the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

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Current theories suggest that halos of dark matter (a Mysterious and invisible substance believed to make up 85% of the total matter in the universe) combined with gas to form the first seedlings of galaxies. One billion to 2 billion years into the universe's life, these early protogalaxies reached adolescence, forming into dwarf galaxies that began devouring one another to grow into ones like our own.