Albert Einstein discovered that mass distorts space-time, a bit like how a bowling ball might stretch a rubber sheet it was resting on. The discovery was made with the help of a warp in the fabric of space-time known as a gravitational lens. "This pushes back the old record for detections like this by about an extra billion years," Spilker said. (The universe is currently about 13.8 billion years old.) Given the extreme distance of SPT0418-47, the light the astronomers detected began its journey less than 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang.
"It's remarkable that the universe can make really large, complex molecules very quickly after the Big Bang," Spilker said. Now, using NASA's extraordinarily powerful new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), Spilker and his colleagues have detected these molecules in a galaxy known as SPT0418-47 more than 12 billion light-years from Earth. However, detecting these molecules in very distant galaxies that formed when the universe was relatively young has been challenging, because telescopes were limited in their sensitivity and the number of wavelengths of light they monitored. Astronomers investigate them because they can help reveal key details of activity within galaxies - for instance, they help influence the rate at which interstellar gas cools. These complex organic molecules are common in space, where they are often linked to tiny dust grains.
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