The James Webb Space Telescope has detected traces of carbon in one of the earliest galaxies ever observed. 

This discovery suggests that a key ingredient for life emerged much sooner than we previously thought— a mere 350 million years after the Big Bang.

The galaxy in question, GS-z12, is a very distant, high-redshift galaxy that existed when the universe was just a toddler. Using JWST’s powerful Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec), an international team of astronomers analyzed the light from this ancient galaxy. They broke it down into a spectrum that revealed the unmistakable chemical fingerprint of carbon.

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