Most scientists think that everything that we know and experience around us began at a moment known as the Big Bang, 14 billion years ago.

The Big Bang itself is not something we can see. We can, however, detect some clues about it.

The only way we can see back to the time when the first stars and galaxies were forming is to look very far away.

Observatories like NASA’s JWST can tell us a clear story about the origins of our Universe.

This is because JWST is cold enough to see faint heat signals of these objects that are so far away.

From speeding galaxies to ancient gas clouds, there is evidence that we can detect today – the remnants of the Big Bang.

Almost all of these galaxies are moving away from us – some at speeds of hundreds of thousands of kilometres every second. This means that the universe is expanding.

If the universe is expanding, then in the past it must have been much smaller.
That there was a moment when all the matter in the universe was packed into a point and expanded outwards. That moment was the Big Bang.

We can even work out when it happened from the speed of the galaxies: about 14 billion years ago.

We can't actually see the galaxies moving, but the clue is in the light coming from them – it is redder than it should be. The faster the galaxy is moving, the redder the light.

Modern telescopes like JWST are so powerful that they can view objects many billions of light years away, close to the time of the Big Bang. If the Big Bang did happen, then we'd expect those distant views to reveal clouds of gas that have not yet turned into stars and galaxies.

Astronomers have recently found gas clouds like this in the distant Universe. Some of them are around 13 billion years old. Even at this incredible distance, we can tell what they are made of by using a technique called spectroscopy to analyze light that passes through them.

The chemical elements of life were first produced in the first generation of stars after the Big Bang. We are here today because of them - and we want to better understand how that came to be! We have ideas, we have predictions, but we don't know exactly when the universe made the first stars and galaxies - or how, for that matter. That is what JWST is going to answer.

Let us know in the comments what you think.

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