PREVIEW

WORDS BYLINE: Hayley Chamberlain

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured an image so detailed it reveals thousands of previously unseen galaxies, peering further into the cosmos than ever before.

The breathtaking snapshot revisits the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, which first stunned the world with almost 10,000 galaxies in one frame. Webb has now gone deeper, spending nearly 100 hours observing a tiny patch of sky in the MIRI Deep Imaging Survey region.

Astronomers combined data from Webb’s mid-infrared and near-infrared cameras, uncovering more than 2,500 light sources, including “hundreds of extremely red galaxies” – distant, dust-shrouded systems packed with “mature stars that formed early in the Universe’s history.”

“Thanks to Webb’s sharp resolution, even at mid-infrared wavelengths, researchers can resolve the structures of many of these galaxies and study how their light is distributed, shedding light on their growth and evolution,” the European Space Agency (ESA) said.

The stunning image is a cosmic rainbow. Galaxies glowing orange and red shine in the longest mid-infrared wavelengths, greenish-white galaxies are the most distant of all, and cooler blue and cyan systems light up in shorter near-infrared wavelengths. ESA explains that “the galaxies in these colours have extra features — such as high concentrations of dust, copious star formation, or an active galactic nucleus (AGN) at their centre — which emit more of this farther infrared light.”

By returning to Hubble’s iconic deep field, Webb has opened a new chapter in the hunt for the earliest cosmic structures. “By returning to this legacy field first made famous by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, Webb is continuing and expanding the deep field tradition — revealing new details, uncovering previously hidden galaxies, and offering fresh insights into the formation of the first cosmic structures,” ESA concludes.