We designed, facilitated, and re-designed an inquiry activity in an introductory undergraduate astronomy research methods course at the University of Texas at Austin over two different semesters. The teaching venue for this inquiry activity took place in the course “AST 376R: A Practical Introduction to Research Methods”, the inquiry activity was inserted into an existing course structure, taking place over multiple class periods. We discuss how we were able to leverage the Professional Development Program (PDP) inquiry themes and introduce students to specific STEM practices, using this experience as a primer or mini version of a larger research activity and research experience that they would determine and lead themselves later on in the semester. In this paper we describe the benefits for students in this course and the lessons learned by the instructors.

We report the discovery of a candidate galaxy with a photo-z of z ~ 12 in the first epoch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey. Following conservative selection criteria, we identify a source with a robust zphot = 11.8-0.2+0.3 (1σ uncertainty) with mF200W = 27.3 and ≥7σ detections in five filters. The source is not detected at λ < 1.4 μm in deep imaging from both Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and JWST and has faint ~3σ detections in JWST F150W and HST F160W, which signal a Lyα break near the red edge of both filters, implying z ~ 12. This object (Maisie's Galaxy) exhibits F115W-F200W > 1.9 mag (2σ lower limit) with a blue continuum slope, resulting in 99.6% of the photo-z probability distribution function favoring z > 11. All data-quality images show no artifacts at the candidate's position, and independent analyses consistently find a strong preference for z > 11. Its colors are inconsistent with Galactic stars, and it is resolved (rh = 340 ± 14 pc). Maisie's Galaxy has log M∗/M⊙ ~ 8.5 and is highly star-forming (log sSFR~-8.2 yr-1), with a blue rest- UV color (β~-2.5) indicating little dust, though not extremely low metallicity. While the presence of this source is in tension with most predictions, it agrees with empirical extrapolations assuming UV luminosity functions that smoothly decline with increasing redshift. Should follow-up spectroscopy validate this redshift, our universe was already aglow with galaxies less than 400 Myr after the Big Bang.