Farther away, a galaxy 13.1 billion light-years away was found to contain oxygen, showing that vital elements for life were already present just a few hundred million years after the universe’s birth.
The new release of images marks the furthest anyone has ever looked in the past and is only possible thanks to the array of advanced instruments on the James Webb space telescopewhich can detect the faintest infrared light in the farthest corners of space.
The new images show thousands of ancient galaxies, billions of lost stars and trillions of long-dead planets.
“It’s like the moon landing for astronomy,” said Gunther Hasinger, the director of science at the European Space Agency. “This is the beginning of a new era to view the universe.”
The new images are possible because the telescope contains instruments that can capture light in the infrared spectrum.
As the universe expands, the light emitted by distant objects is stretched, increasing in wavelength and becoming redder before finally reaching the infrared spectrum, where it can no longer be seen by the human eye.
It is known as cosmological redshift and is similar to the Doppler effect, where sounds change as they move further away.
To detect such dim red light, the telescope has 18 hexagonal mirror segments, each 1.3 meters wide, which direct even the faintest rays to four infrared instruments.