13 April 2023
Ultra Deep Field
© NASA
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has turned its sharp eyes on a distant patch of sky made famous by its predecessor. A newly released Webb photo captures the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF), a faraway region in the southern constellation Fornax (the Furnace). The HUDF has long been an extremely fertile hunting ground for astronomers, as it contains at least 10,000 galaxies dating back to just 800 million years after the Big Bang, providing a glimpse into how the very first galaxies may have formed. When NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope observed this pocket of the universe in late 2003, it clicked the first images of galaxies at the farthest distances ever known. At the time, Hubble’s representatives said this record was “unlikely to be surpassed” until Webb comes onto the stage.