Just May 2025, the James Webb Space Telescope dropped a cosmic bombshell that's got astronomers everywhere scrambling to rewrite their textbooks.
Meet MoM-z14, a galaxy whose light has been cruising through space for a mind-blowing 13.5 billion years before hitting Webb's sensors. We're basically looking at baby photos of this primordial mystery - snapshots from when the universe was just 280 million years old. That's less than 2% of its current age!
But here's the kicker: MoM-z14 isn't just breaking distance records. This galaxy is ridiculously dense, crazy bright, and - get this - practically dust-free. That's like finding a teenager's room that's spotlessly clean. This weird detail tells us the blazing light we're seeing isn't from some monster black hole chomping down matter, but from stars being born at an absolutely insane rate.
And all this is making astronomers question everything they thought they knew about how the first cosmic structures came to be.
To find out more, keep watching!