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The Webb Space Telescope has extended our ability to ‘see’ the past to just under 14 Billion Years.

And the objects we see at that distance are almost red shifted to the point of invisibility, but we can still gather some data from the faint photons that Webb has gathered.

For instance, we still see the objects as star clusters, crude galaxies, that are irregular in shape, but definitely recognizable as galaxies.

Now what does that tell us?

It tells us that gravity existed, was weaker than it is now, though still formidable as a force.

It tells us that there was star formation and lots of it.

If there was star formation, then there was element formation going on in those ancient furnaces.

Though the number of heavy elements were not many, they were being created. It would take several more billion years to get to iron and others.

There was plenty of hydrogen floating around to amass enough to light the nuclear fusion fires of lots of stars.

I posit that these ‘stars’ did not have planets or any such non-gaseous solids within their vicinity. There had not been enough novae and supernovas to create them yet.

These stars were massive by comparison to our stars of today. Ultra-Giant stars of pure hydrogen that was not polluted with heavy elements. They created helium on an unimaginable scale.

The irregular shape of these proto-galaxies apparently is due to a lack of gravity to organize into spirals and no black holes in the center yet.

They are just groups of wandering stars that have enough mass in them to ignite but their affect on their neighbors isn’t enough to depress space-time to allow them to collide or merge unless it’s by total random accident.