Exclusive: ‘Massive’ discovery raises possibility conditions for life were present almost from dawn of time
The James Webb space telescope is able to observe the light emitted from galaxies that existed billions of years ago.The James Webb space telescope is able to observe the light emitted from galaxies that existed billions of years ago.Astronomers have detected carbon in a galaxy observed just 350m years after the big bang, in observations that raise the possibility that the conditions for life were present almost from the dawn of time.
“The finding of a large amount of carbon in such a distant galaxy implies that life could have potentially emerged very early in the universe, really close to cosmic dawn.” Carbon is a fundamental element in this process, since it can clump into grains of dust in a swirling disc around stars, eventually snowballing into the earliest planets. It was previously thought that carbon enrichment occurred about 1bn years after the big bang.
“The very first stars are the holy grail of chemical evolution, since they are made only of primordial elements, and they behave very differently to modern stars,” said Dr Francesco D’Eugenio, an astrophysicist the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at Cambridge and the lead author of the findings. “By studying how and when the first metals formed inside stars, we can set a time frame for the earliest steps on the path that led to the formation of life.
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