NASA’s powerful James Webb Space Telescope has found an unexpectedly rich “undiscovered country” of early galaxies that has been largely hidden until now.

Webb is unveiling a very rich universe where the first forming galaxies look remarkably different from the mature galaxies seen around us today. Researchers found two exceptionally bright galaxies that existed approximately 350 and 450 million years after the big bang. Their extreme brightness is puzzling to astronomers. The young galaxies are transforming gas into stars extremely rapidly. They appear compacted in spherical or disk shapes that are much smaller than our Milky Way galaxy. The onset of stellar birth may have started just 100 million years after the big bang, which happened 13.8 billion years ago.

Follow-up spectroscopic observations with Webb should confirm the distances to these remote galaxies, and also reveal the rate of star formation and elemental abundances in the makeup of the early stars.