James Webb Space Telescope makes discovery from beginning of the universe that could change everything for scientists

NASA's leading instrument to discover the hidden wonders of the universe could be about to re-write history as we know it after a startling discovery from the beginning of the universe.

We are of course talking about the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a $10 billion (£8 billion) piece of kit that has revolutionised remote space exploration for almost two years.

Put together alongside the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), the JWST was shot into space on Christmas Day 2021, sending its first pictures back to Earth in July the next year.

Now, the telescope has found one of the essential ingredients to life shortly after the Big Bang itself some 13.8 billion years ago.

That's because the JWST acts as a real-life time machine, taking images from deep in space with these pictures at huge distances away from what is being captured by its Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam).

And because of how light travels, when looking at objects that are far away, we see them not as they are but as they were.

The same would be said of alien life looking at Earth - they wouldn't see us now but Earth a long, long time ago depending on how many light years away from our planet they are.

The James Webb Space Telescope has made a remarkable discovery (NASA/Getty Stock Images)

The lastest discovery by Webb is a massive cloud of carbon in a distant galaxy that came about just 350 million years after the start of the universe.

That might sound like a long time after the Big Bang - because it is - but it tells us something that might make scientists have to have a rather large re-think.

A paper on the discovery, published in scientific journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, hints at what we might now have to reassess.

An amazing image of deep space captured by the JWST (NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI)

Roberto Maiolino, co-author of the paper and professor of experimental astrophysics at the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge, said in a statement: "Earlier research suggested that carbon started to form in large quantities relatively late—about one billion years after the Big Bang.

"But we've found that carbon formed much earlier—it might even be the oldest metal of all."

Lead author Dr. Francesco D'Eugenio, from the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at Cambridge, told Forbes that it was the first confirmed detection of a chemical element outside of the earliest known elements produced by the Big Bang itself.

And given that the Big Bang only created hydrogen, helium and lithium, the carbon has to have been made inside stars.

He said: "The very first stars are the holy grail of chemical evolution. Since they are made only of primordial elements, they behave very differently to modern stars.

"By studying how and when the first metals formed inside stars, we can set a time frame for the earliest steps on the path that led to the formation of life."

D'Eugenio added: "Because carbon is fundamental to life as we know it, it's not necessarily true that life must have evolved much later in the universe.

"Perhaps life emerged much earlier — although if there's life elsewhere in the universe, it might have evolved very differently than it did here on Earth."