[MUSIC PLAYING] 
[Maximilien Franco] 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. 

[Micaela Bagley] 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. 

[James Trussler] 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. 

[Maximilien Franco] 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. 

[Micaela Bagley] 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. 

[James Trussler] 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. 

[Maximilien Franco] 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. 

[Micaela Bagley] 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? 

[James Trussler] 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.