When researchers glimpsed the first images and data from the James Webb Space Telescope, humanity’s largest and most powerful space telescope, they noticed something peculiar. A large number of bright galaxies deep in the universe formed during a period called “Cosmic Dawn,” when the first stars and galaxies formed within 500 million years after the Big Bang. New research published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters shows that a theoretical model produced roughly five years ago predicted these very observations and credits them to bursty star formation.

To glimpse the earliest days of the cosmos, astronomers like UC Davis Associate Professor Tucker Jones rely not only on the magnification of telescopes, but also on powerful natural magnification from our cosmic neighbors in the form of gravitational lenses. For Jones, identifying these gravitational lenses is a first step to understanding the origin of the cosmos.