The earliest stars may have been forged just 250 million years after the Big Bang, say scientists who observed a galaxy at a record-setting distance of 13.28 billion light-years from Earth.
Scientists using the the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) found faint, telltale signature of oxygen coming from the galaxy - which is seen as it appeared when the universe was only 500 million years old.
For such a young galaxy, known as MACS1149-JD1, to contain detectable traces of oxygen, it must have begun forging stars even earlier - a scant 250 million years after the Big Bang.
This is exceptionally early in the history of the universe and suggests that rich chemical environments evolved quickly, according to the study published in the journal Nature