WHEN the first observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) were made public in July 2022, the images of deep space were so breathtakingly beautiful that it was easy to overlook the dowdy-looking graph released alongside them. The world was agog at the majestic panoramas of clouds of gas and dust from which stars are born, and the shining spiral shapes of ludicrously distant galaxies. Yet for many astronomers, the graph, a simple curving line, was just as jaw-dropping. It heralded a new era in the search for alien life.
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