'Time travel' 13 billion years, strange object reveals how the universe began

The James Webb Space Telescope has captured a never-before-seen object that is a "missing link" in the history of the universe.

According to a research team from Oxford University (UK) and the University of Chicago (USA), the object JADES-GS+53.12175-27.79763 recorded by the world's most powerful space telescope is a galaxy, but unlike any other known type of galaxy.

The strange object recorded by James Webb is a galaxy completely different from known galaxies - (Photo: NASA/ESA/CSA).

Dr Alex Cameron from the University of Oxford, a member of the research team, said his first thought when looking at the spectrum of the galaxy was "how strange".

According to him, this ancient object represents completely new phenomena in the early universe , which can help us know how the universe began.

Because the light from that distant object took nearly 13 billion years to reach Earth's telescopes, the image we see of it is also an image of the past nearly 13 billion years ago.

According to Sci-News , in the early universe, it has been calculated that typical hot, massive stars had temperatures ranging from 40,000 to 50,000 degrees Celsius, which is nearly 10 times hotter than our Sun.

In the ancient galaxy just recorded, stars even reached temperatures of up to 80,000 degrees Celsius.

Researchers suspect the galaxy is in a brief and intense period of star formation, inside a dense cloud of gas that is continuously giving birth to "monster" stars.

This gas cloud is being hit by so many photons of light from the stars that it becomes very bright.

These stars do not belong to the Group III group of stars - the first generation of stars in the universe - because the nebulae they leave behind after they die have quite complex chemical compositions.

However, they are not any known ancient star.

So scientists believe we're looking directly at the "missing link," a generation of stars that lies between the protostars and the second-generation stars we previously speculated about.

This also helps us understand how galaxies transitioned from a collection of extreme, short-lived primordial stars to the type of galaxies we see today.

In other words, the strange object that James Webb recorded represents a previously unknown stage of the evolution of the galactic world.

The new research was just published in the scientific journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.