A baby galaxy was so ridiculously hot it blasted a 650,000 light-year hole right through the fog of the early universe.
March 20, 2026
Original Paper
An OASIS of Lyman-$α$ within a neutral intergalactic desert: reaffirmed line and blue continuum reveal efficient ionising agents at $z = 13$
arXiv · 2603.18775
The Takeaway
For hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang, the universe was filled with a neutral hydrogen 'fog' that blocked light. This specific galaxy was discovered to be so powerful that it created its own massive bubble of transparent, ionized space just 400 million years after the beginning of time.
From the abstract
$\require{mediawiki-texvc}$Galaxy assembly was already well underway in the first 400 Myr of cosmic time, as recently revealed by JWST. However, the contribution of these early galaxies to cosmic reionisation remains uncertain. Here we present new JWST/NIRSpec observations of GS-z13-1-LA obtained as part of the OASIS and JADES programmes, whose combined deep (56 h) NIRSpec/PRISM spectrum confirms the Lyman-$\mathrm{\alpha}$ line detection and blue UV continuum at redshift $z = 13.1$ presented in