JWST begins its SCIENCE JOURNEY

Colin Stuart

(@skyponderer) is an astronomy author and speaker. Get a free e-book at colinstuart.net/ebook

What do the first stars look like?

JWST will take us back to when the very first galaxies appeared

Astronomers are always looking back into the past. That’s because it takes time for light to travel across the Universe. We don’t see things as they are when the light arrives here, but as they were when the light first departed. For distant galaxies, the delay is millions and even billions of years.

So very distant galaxies were also some of the first galaxies to form in the Universe. The Hubble Space Telescope revolutionised this area of research, finding thousands of distant galaxies in a patch of sky so tiny that it could be covered by a grain of sand held at arm’s length.

The light from the most distant galaxy observed before JWST – HD1 – took a staggering 13.1 billion