James Webb telescope spots rare 'missing link' galaxy at the dawn of time

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has found a bizarre galaxy in the early universe whose gas outshines its stars, marking  it out as a possible missing link in galactic evolution.

The galaxy, called GS-NDG-9422 (9422), was spotted just one billion years after the Big Bang and is filled with massive stars burning nearly twice as hot as those typically found in the local universe. 

These exotic stars are bombarding the gas clouds that surround them with enormous quantities of light particles (photons) , heating the clouds up and causing them to outshine the stars they enshroud — a rare trait hypothesized to exist in galaxies that contain the oldest generations of stars, according to the study authors. The researchers published their findings in the October issue of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

"My first thought in looking at the galaxy's spectrum was, 'that's weird,' which is exactly what the Webb telescope was designed to reveal: totally new phenomena in the early universe that will help us understand how the cosmic story began," lead researcher Alex Cameron, an astronomer at the University of Oxford, said in a statement.

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 during the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang. 

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Astronomers also aren't certain of the types of stars that formed in the early universe, or the time they took to ignite. Yet, as the only material emitted by the Big Bang was hydrogen and helium, the original, primordial stars (dubbed Population III stars) are thought to have been extremely large, very bright and incredibly hot.