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Using the James Webb Space Telescope, scientists have peered back into the primordial universe and discovered galaxies that existed when the universe was only 300 to 400 million years old.

Shells of cosmic dust appear like tree rings around the star Wolf-Rayet 140 in this JWST image. Wolf-Rayet stars are at an advanced stage of their lifecycles, releasing heavy elements into space, and this one is part of a binary system with an O-type star, one of the most massive star types known. The remarkable regularity of the shells' spacing indicates that the layers form like clockwork during the system's eight-year orbit, when the two stars in the binary make their closest approach to one another.

In contrast, Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) is able to peer through the dusty pillars to show newly formed stars in shades of pink, red, and crimson. Near-infrared light can penetrate thick dust clouds, allowing astronomers to learn more about this incredible scene. The pillars are a small region within the Eagle Nebula, a vast star-forming region 6,500 light-years from Earth.

Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) captures a thunderstorm of gas and dust in the iconic Pillars of Creation. When knots of gas and dust form in these regions, they can collapse under their own gravity, slowly heat up, and eventually form new stars.

Tens of thousands of never-before-seen young stars were previously shrouded in the cosmic dust of the Tarantula Nebula. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope can penetrate through the dust clouds to see the stars due to its unprecedented resolution in infrared wavelengths. The most active region appears to sparkle with massive, pale blue stars. Scattered among them are newly formed stars, appearing red, yet to emerge from the dusty cocoon of the nebula.

This side-by-side comparison shows observations of the Southern Ring Nebula in near-infrared light, at left, and mid-infrared light, at right, from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.

Stephan’s Quintet, a visual grouping of five galaxies, is shown in JWST’s largest image yet. It contains more than 150 million pixels and is constructed from almost a thousand separate image files. This new view is providing insights into how galactic interactions may have driven galaxy evolution in the early universe.

This view of the Carina Nebula evokes landscape scenes of mountains and valleys speckled with glittering stars. The image reveals the edge of a nearby star-forming region called NGC 3324, captured in infrared light by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, showing for the first time previously invisible areas of star birth.

In one of the first images captured by NASA’s James Webb Telescope during its testing phase, a handful of stars, distinguished by their diffraction spikes, shine amidst thousands of faint galaxies, some in the nearby universe, but many more in the distant universe.