If you come from a non-technical background, where many physical discoveries of varying difficulty all seem impossible, it's an obviously misleading headline.
How often people of non technical background go to science magazine with so little knowledge that they assume there's a way to find the universe's first molecule?
I don’t know much about physics/astronomy. My rough understanding is that very early in the Big Bang, all matter/energy was condensed into some really exotic form and it turned into atoms and molecules as it expanded. When I read the headline, I imagined that during the Big Bang a molecule was produced that somehow had a lot of energy and emitted that energy in such a way that we managed to detect some kind of echo of it today. I have seen images described as images of radiation from the Big Bang, so this sounded impressive but not unbelievable to me.
This was my impression too. I still thought it was probably not what they meant - maybe a 10% chance that it was - but it was misleading nonetheless.
As someone who is technical in computer science and non-technical in physics and astronomy, "pulsars may spew bits of exotic matter that convert everything they touch" and "scientists have found literally the first molecule" are equally believable to me.
thanks for this set of replies. i now agree, the headline could be interpreted as misleading. were it in business insider, i'd say intentionally. in a science mag (that isn't _Popular Science_), i still give the editors the benefit of the doubt.