The first billion years of the universe.
It's a very short
time in the scheme of the universe.
But during these first billion years,
a lot of transition happens.
We're looking at baby galaxies.
So, what's exciting
is, is learning
how galaxies can form and grow
and get bigger
and turn into things like the Milky Way
and Andromeda that we see today.
Now, what James Webb
is really transforming
already in this first year
of this revolutionary data
is our understanding of the properties
of those first galaxies,
because we can now study them
in much greater detail than before.
In only one year
of James
Webb Space Telescope observations,
we’ve already detected hundreds and hundreds
of very distant galaxies, of galaxies
with redshift of over nine
in the first 500
million years of the universe.
Part of the value of the Webb deep
fields is not just the depth.
We're seeing things that are fainter.
It's also that we're seeing things
at redder wavelengths.
And so, we're looking at longer and longer
wavelengths of light
than we could with Hubble.
So take, really, decades
of tremendous work of Hubble,
and within just a week
we had already surpassed
that with James Webb.
So, our quest
for these early galaxies
is dramatically advancing very quickly.
But we're still hoping to find
the signatures of the first light
through to the very first galaxies,
those pristine
pure hydrogen, pure helium galaxies.
They still await us.
By observing the first galaxies
we want to push the limits of the telescope.
We want to observe further
and further away.
And by observing further
and further away,
we will detect galaxies a little
bit different probably.
I am really excited about learning
what those first galaxies looked like.
You know, how big were they?
How many stars were they forming?
How were they forming those stars?
Much like an archeologist here on Earth,
can tell us great tales of civilization
past, from the, really,
the remnants that survive, to the present –
so the ruins that survive to today,
or the ancient tools and ornaments – so
too can astronomers
tell us something
about the very first stars
in this indirect way
by looking for very old stars
and very distant galaxies
when the cosmos was very young.