[MUSIC PLAYING] 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 with 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 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.
How big were they?
How many stars were they forming?
How were they forming those stars?
Much like an archaeologist here on Earth
can tell us great tales of civilization past,
from the, really, the remnants that survived 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.