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Image by NASA

In 800 exposures taken between 2003 and 2004, the Hubble Space Telescope captured what was then the deepest, most detailed visible view of the universe, known as the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field and seen here. Using JWST, scientists have now looked in the same region to discover some of the earliest galaxies to date.

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.

Cassiopeia A is the remnant of a once massive star that died in a violent supernova explosion 325 years ago. It consists of a dead star, called a neutron star, and a surrounding shell of material that was blasted off as the star died. This image is a composite using three NASA observatories in three different wavelengths of light: infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope (red), visible data from Hubble (yellow), and x-ray data from Chandra (green and blue).

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.

The image reveals the crisp detail of the crater rim, with individual boulders around the outside and on the inner walls. That indicates that this crater probably isn't very old, so it hasn't been heavily modified. This odd shape probably happened when it first formed.

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.