How does a galaxy get this bright in 280 million years? In 2025, astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope confirmed the most distant galaxy seen so far, and the team that found it counts a hundred times more bright early galaxies than theory predicted before the telescope launched. Not a hundred times brighter. A hundred times more of them.

In this episode: how Webb catches light that has been travelling for about 98 percent of the universe's history, and why the big bang was not an explosion in empty space. The earlier record holder, a galaxy more than 1,600 light-years across, already holding oxygen. Then Beyond the Obvious: squeeze the whole history of the universe into one calendar year, and Webb is seeing galaxies from the second week of January, one of them with more nitrogen than astronomers expected that early. We go through the suspects: black holes that make some galaxies look bigger than they are, stars that formed faster in a denser universe, and a 2023 proposal that the universe is 26.7 billion years old. We explain where the accepted 13.8 billion comes from and why it has not changed. And we say what nobody knows yet: why there are so many.

Every figure comes from NASA, ESA and arXiv pages, linked in the video description on YouTube. Where the sources don't explain something, we say so.

Watch the video edition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PuMvEfJ-zE

Narration: synthetic voice. Research, writing and editing: human work. Echoes of the Void.