New data reveals how galaxies grew in the early universe

JWST recently caught three of the universe’s earliest galaxies in the act of pulling themselves together from a giant, dark cloud of hydrogen gas.

The three dim spots of red light in a recent batch of JWST data traveled more than 13 billion light years across space to reach the telescope’s mirrors. That ancient light carries a snapshot of what galaxies looked like between 400 and 600 million years after the Big Bang, back when the universe was basically a cosmic toddler. And all three of these early galaxies are shrouded in dense hydrogen gas, which is slowly falling into the galaxies’ gravity wells — where it will eventually help them form new stars. READ MORE from Inverse