![](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/07155751/SEI_207731117.jpg)
An image captured by the James Webb Space Telescope showing thousands of extremely distant galaxies
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team
The first stars in the universe, huge behemoths thousands of times the mass of our sun, could have formed in the blink of an eye, cosmologically speaking, after the big bang.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been able to detect distant galaxies from when the universe was barely 300 million years old. Models suggest star formation could have begun even earlier in the 13.8-billion-year history of the universe, perhaps within 200 million years or…