Galaxy AzTECC71 as imaged by the James Webb Space Telescope.

Galaxy AzTECC71 as imaged by the James Webb Space Telescope. Galaxy AzTECC71 as imaged by the James Webb Space Telescope. (Image credit: J. McKinney/M. Franco/C. Casey/The University of Texas at Austin) This image of a galaxy from the early universe is hardly what you'd call dazzling. You are looking at a very blurry, highly dust-obscured resident of the cosmos whose name is only a string of numbers and letters. It even sits at a distance so far from Earth that it slips in and out of the watchful eyes of various telescopes. The image, captured by the powerful James Webb Space Telescope, spotlights galaxy AzTECC71 — but what's striking here is that we're seeing AzTECC71the way it was just 900 million years after the Big Bang. That's when the universe was turning on its very first stars, absolute eons before our solar system was born. The James Webb Space Telescope's view of this galaxy as a hazy speck of light is a far cry from many other glorious images of galaxies and galaxy clusters in its repertoire. However, even this smudge holds important lessons for our understanding of the early universe. "The fact that even something that extreme is barely visible in the most sensitive imaging from our newest telescope is so exciting to me," study author Jed McKinney of the University of Texas at Austin said in a statement. "It's potentially telling us there's a whole population of galaxies that have been hiding from us." Related: James Webb telescope discovers dark secret of 'The Brick,' a gas cloud flipping assumptions about how stars are born CLOSE This could mean the early universe was much dustier than previously thought,