And doing so allowed scientists to find the earliest galaxies humanity has ever seen (so far, that is). These galaxies, containing countless stars, were created soon after the universe was born.
"For the first time, we have discovered galaxies only 350 million years after the big bang, and we can be absolutely confident of their fantastic distances," Brant Robertson, an astrophysicist at the University of California Santa Cruz who worked on the research, said in a statement. "To find these early galaxies in such stunningly beautiful images is a special experience."
To capture the profoundly faint light from these galaxies, the astronomical team trained the Webb telescope – the most powerful space observatory ever built – on a relatively tiny patch of sky. But they looked for many hours, catching lots of detail. "The image is only the size a human appears when viewed from a mile away," the European Space Agency, which runs the telescope with NASA and the Canadian Space Agency, explained. "However, it teems with nearly 100,000 galaxies, each caught at some moment in their history, billions of years in the past."
Webb telescope just found the most ancient galaxies anyone's ever seen
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