James Webb Space Telescope captures stunning ultra deep field image, revealing the universe’s earliest galaxies in infrared

The James Webb Space Telescope went back to the same place where the Hubble Telescope took its famous picture called the Ultra Deep Field. JWST’s new picture shows galaxies from different times by looking at two small areas of the sky that Hubble first took pictures of in 1995 and 2004.

The Hubble Deep Fields were Hubble’s deepest views into space, showing the faintest, oldest galaxies visible to it—some more than 13 billion years old, meaning their light traveled for that long to reach Earth, as per the report by Space.

Hubble’s deep field showed very old galaxies

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field was revisited by Hubble multiple times—in 2009, 2012, and 2014—using near-infrared technology to see even farther and more galaxies, capturing about 10,000 galaxies in a very tiny patch of sky.


This tiny patch of sky is only 2.4 arcminutes square, which is less than a tenth of the full Moon’s diameter as seen from Earth. However, Hubble has limits. It cannot see the farthest galaxies because their visible light is stretched into infrared light, which Hubble’s instruments cannot detect well, according to the report by Space.

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James Webb Telescope sees farther with infrared light

To see farther, the JWST, with its larger 6.5-meter mirror, was used because it can see infrared light better than Hubble. JWST first looked at the Hubble Ultra Deep Field in October 2022 using its Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam).

Since then, JWST has looked at this field multiple times through the JADES project, and the latest image was taken by JWST’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) using a survey called MIDIS. MIRI’s filter called F560W, which detects infrared light between 4.9 and 6.4 micrometres, took the longest exposure of any filter for this image, totaling 41 hours of observation, as stated by Space report.

The new picture shows only a small part of the Ultra Deep Field and has about 2,500 galaxies you can see. About 80% of these galaxies are very far away. None of them are the farthest galaxies we know because they are from about 380 million years after the Big Bang, which is 13.4 billion years ago.

Farthest Galaxy MoM-z14 and JWST’s infrared view

The farthest galaxy we know is called MoM-z14. It shows us how things looked about 280 million years after the Big Bang. This galaxy is not in the new Ultra Deep Field picture. When scientists add data from JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera, they get a clearer view of these galaxies, which mostly look like tiny dots of light, according to Space report.

The image is shown in false color because infrared light is invisible to the human eye. This coloring helps scientists see different features. Hundreds of the red-colored galaxies in the image are either star-forming galaxies covered in dust that absorbs and re-emits starlight in infrared, or are older galaxies with lots of red stars formed early in the universe.

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The small greenish-white galaxies represent very distant, high redshift galaxies, mostly from the universe’s first billion years. The larger blue and cyan galaxies are closer to us, have low redshifts, and look brighter in the Near-Infrared Camera images than in the Mid-Infrared. Astronomers keep adding more JWST observations to explore how galaxies developed from near the universe’s birth to today, as stated by the Space report.

Scientists hope to find answers to big cosmic questions, like how supermassive black holes formed, how galaxies formed, and when most stars were created. This work is ongoing, so more exciting discoveries are expected as JWST keeps observing. The study describing these JWST Ultra Deep Field observations was published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

FAQs

Q1. What is the James Webb Space Telescope’s Ultra Deep Field image?
It is a deep space photo showing thousands of distant galaxies using infrared light, taken by JWST in the same area Hubble first studied.

Q2. How is JWST different from the Hubble Telescope?
JWST can see farther into space by detecting infrared light, allowing it to view older and more distant galaxies than Hubble.