When our universe was very young, it was a dark place filled with a neutral and opaque gas. How that gas became transparent is something that scientists have been trying to understand for a long time. Many believe that change involved the first generation of extremely massive, luminous and hot stars to form after the big bang. Soon, through the power of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers may come closer to answering that question.

By peering deep into the universe, Webb will actually look back in time. A large, ambitious, deep-sky survey totaling nearly 800 hours of observing time will trace the formation and evolution of the first galaxies in what is possibly the cosmos' busiest star-forming period. Other open questions this survey will address are how rapidly galaxies form and assemble, and how quickly and where they form their stars. Also, scientists know that supermassive black holes were already in place less than 1 billion years after the big bang. With Webb, they hope to detect the primeval seeds of these monsters.

Lee esta historia en español.