With the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers are now able to peer so far back in time that we are approaching the epoch where we think that the first galaxies were created. Throughout most of the history of the universe, galaxies seemingly tend to follow a tight relation between how many stars they have formed, and how many heavy elements they have formed.
But for the first time we now see signs that this relation between the amount of stars and elements does not hold for the earliest galaxies. The reason is likely that these galaxies simply are in the process of being created, and have not yet had the time to create the heavy elements.
This relation makes sense, because the universe consisted originally only of these two lightest elements. All heavier elements, such as carbon, oxygen, and iron, was created later by the stars. This plot shows the observed galaxies in an"element-stellar mass diagram": The farther to the right a galaxy is, the more massive it is, and the farther up, the more heavy elements it contains. The gray icons represent galaxies in the present-day universe, while the red show the new observations of early galaxies. These clearly have much less heavy elements than later galaxies, but agree roughly with theoretical predictions, indicated by the blue band.
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