On Christmas Day 2021, alongside other astronomers, I watched the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launch from French Guiana and begin its month-long journey to its destination, 1.5 million ...

For decades, astronomers were only able to study the universe's very first stars using theoretical models. Now, observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed what may be the ...

A newly discovered star suggests tiny relic galaxies like Pictor II preserved the chemical material created by the universe's first star explosions and later helped build larger galaxies like the ...

An observation of an ultra-faint galaxy, captured as it was shortly after the Big Bang, indicates the presence of material from the first generation of stars. Because light travels at a finite speed, ...

The first stars were massive, hot, and bright, forming from primordial clumps of hydrogen and helium. They lived fast and died young, but not before producing new elements in their stellar remains ...