The James Webb Space Telescope is a powerful space telescope launched by NASA, European Space Agency (ESA), and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) on December 25, 2021. It is designed to be the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, but instead of orbiting Earth, it orbits the Sun at a special point called the Lagrange Point 2 (L2), about 1.5 million kilometers (1 million miles) away from Earth. Unlike Hubble, which mainly captures visible and ultraviolet light, Webb is built to see in infrared light, allowing it to look through dust clouds and detect extremely faint objects, like the earliest galaxies formed after the Big Bang. It has a massive 6.5 meter wide gold-coated mirror that collects much more light than Hubble, making it 100 times more powerful. Webb has already provided stunning images of distant galaxies, exoplanets, and nebulae, helping scientists understand the origins of the universe. Because it operates far from Earth, it can’t be repaired like Hubble, so it was designed with extreme precision so it can last as long as possible. 

Webb’s First Deep Field is the first full-color image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), released on July 11, 2022. It is the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the universe ever taken at that time. The image shows SMACS 0723, a massive galaxy cluster about 4.6 billion light-years away. 

Because of a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, the gravity of this cluster acts like a cosmic magnifying glass, bending and amplifying the light from galaxies far behind it. This allowed Webb to reveal thousands of incredibly distant galaxies, some of which formed over 13 billion years ago, shortly after the Big Bang! The image is filled with sparkling galaxies of different shapes, colors, and sizes, giving us a glimpse of the early universe.

Compared to Hubble’s deep field images, Webb’s deep field was captured in just 12.5 hours, while Hubble took weeks to capture similar details. This proves how much more powerful (JWST) is, allowing scientists to explore the first galaxies, distant exoplanets, and the mysteries of the universe.