Blowing bubbles in the early Universe

Do infant galaxies work together to clear the hydrogen around them?

- Prof Chris Lintott

Much of the excitement about early JWST observations has come from finding the most distant galaxies, which we see as they were just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. What's now becoming clear is that there are remarkable systems all over the early Universe, and none more so than galaxy JADES-GS-z7-LA, the subject of this month's paper.

In images, the galaxy is not much more than a faint splodge a few pixels across, but JWST spectra of this faint source tell us that it's a galaxy at a redshift of 7.3. That means that we're seeing a system just 729 million years after the Big Bang. What's even more impressive is that, through careful analysis of that spectrum, we can say something about what this thing was actually like.