LAP1-B

The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered the LAP1-B galaxy, located 13 billion light years away, which appears to be one of the most primitive galaxies ever observed. The galaxy contains barely any heavy elements, supporting cosmologists' theory that heavier atoms were created in the explosive deaths of early massive stars. This discovery provides insight into how the universe began forging the complex chemical elements that eventually made up everything, including humans.

Astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope to observe an ultra-faint galaxy called LAP1-B, existing roughly 800 million years after the Big Bang. The galaxy is 13 billion light-years away from Earth and was spotted due to a massive cluster of galaxies. This discovery provides insights into the ancient epoch when the Universe's first generation of stars ignited.

LAP1-B is an ultra-faint galaxy that formed in the reionization era and is strongly magnified by gravitational lensing. It is chemically primitive and hosts very few stars in a dominant dark matter halo. The discovery was published in Nature on May 13, 2026.