James Webb telescope finds carbon at the dawn of the universe, challenging our understanding of when life could have emerged
The discovery — a cloud of carbon in a distant and compact galaxy as it appeared just 350 million years after the Big Bang — marks the earliest detection of an element other than hydrogen in the universe. The results have been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, and a preprint version can be found on arXiv.
"Earlier research suggested that carbon started to form in large quantities relatively late — about one billion years after the Big Bang," co-author Roberto Maiolino, a professor of experimental astrophysics at the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge, said in a statement. "But we've found that carbon formed much earlier — it might even be the oldest metal of all."