JWST resolved a galaxy from 800 million years after the Big Bang while NEO Surveyor — the only NASA mission Congress has required by statute — remains roughly 30 years behind its city-killer catalog deadline, and the gap is a lesson in what makes a prob

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have achieved remarkable results in observing ultra-faint galaxies from the early universe, detecting light that has traveled for roughly 13 billion years. These observations capture galaxies as they appeared when the universe was less than a billion years old, with chemical signatures consistent with enrichment by the universe’s first generation of stellar objects.

JWST resolved a galaxy from 800 million years after the Big Bang while NEO Surveyor — the only NASA mission Congress has required by statute — remains roughly 30 years behind its city-killer catalog deadline, and the gap is a lesson in what makes a prob. Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have achieved remarkable results in observing ultra-faint galaxies from the early universe, detecting light that has traveled for roughly 13 billion years. These observations capture galaxies as they appeared when the universe was less than a billion years old, with chemical signatures consistent with enrichment by the universe’s first generation of stellar objects. Gravitational lensing from foreground galaxy clusters has magnified the light by factors approaching one hundred, making otherwise impossible observations feasible. These result...