Relics of the first stars spotted in a distant, ultra-faint galaxy

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13 May 2026 Relics of the first stars spotted in a distant, ultra-faint galaxy An observation of an ultra-faint galaxy, captured as it was shortly after the Big Bang, indicates the presence of material from the first generation of stars. By Alexander Ji ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4863-8842 0 Alexander Ji Alexander Ji is in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA. View author publications PubMed Google Scholar

Astronomers are the luckiest of all historians: we can see back in time by looking at objects that are very far away. However, as we look farther and farther into the Universe, our observations tend to be biased towards the most luminous and massive galaxies. Now, writing in Nature, Nakajima et al.1 report observations made using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) of a distant, low-mass galaxy named LAP1-B in the early Universe. Their results indicate that this snapshot of LAP1-B was captured very early in the galaxy’s evolution, shortly after its first generation of stars reached the end of their lives. The descendants of such low-mass galaxies have previously been found around the Milky Way, but this is the first observation of such a small galaxy at its birth.

Nature 653, 357-358 (2026)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-01151-1

References Nakajima, K. et al. Nature 653, 363–367 (2026). Naidu, R. et al. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2410.01874 (2024). Frebel, A. et al. Nature 434, 871–873 (2005). Brown, T. M. et al. Astrophys. J. 796, 91 (2014). Chiti, A. et al. Nature Astron. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-026-02802-z (2026). Geha, M. et al. Astrophys. J. 771, 29 (2013). Caffau, E. et al. Nature 477, 67–69 (2011). Ji, A. P. et al. Astrophys. J. 961, L41 (2024). Morishita, T. et al. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2507.10521 (2025). Fujimoto, S. et al. Astrophys. J. 989, 46 (2025). Download references

Competing Interests The author declares no competing interests.

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