Free Astronomy Magazine March-April 2026

MARCH-APRIL 2026 mous oddball in another branch of science: biology’s taxonomy-defying platypus. “It seems that we’ve iden- tified a population of galaxies that we can’t categorize, they are so odd. On the one hand they are ex- tremely tiny and compact, like a point source, yet we do not see the characteristics of a quasar, an active supermassive black hole, which is what most distant point sources are,” said Yan. “I looked at these characteristics and thought, this is like looking at a platypus. You think that these things should not exist together, but there it is right in front of you, and it’s undeniable,” Yan said. The team whittled down a sample of 2,000 sources across sev- eral Webb surveys to identify nine point-like sources that existed 12 to 12.6 billion years ago (compared to A fter combing through NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s archive of sweep- ing extragalactic cosmic fields, a small team of astronomers at the University of Missouri says they have identified a sample of galaxies that have a previously unseen combina- tion of features. Principal investigator Haojing Yan compares the discovery to an infa-