--- title: James Webb Discovery Helps Date Birth of Very First Galaxies description: Astronomers use the James Webb Space Telescope to discover four galaxies dating back to just 400 million years after the Big Bang. canonical: https://time.com/6240683/james-webb-telescope-discovers-oldest-galaxies-ever-seen/ author: Jeffrey Kluger article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2022-12-13T19:12:07.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-10-19T07:05:26.668Z article:section: Science og:title: Ancient Galaxies Revealed by Webb Unveil Clues About What Happened Just After The Big Bang og:description: Astronomers spot a galactic quartet dating to just 400 million years after the Big Bang og:url: https://time.com/6240683/james-webb-telescope-discovers-oldest-galaxies-ever-seen/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt3dedf5c5b9ffac32/698a38c0b21a9c67a6506c5d/WebbMirror.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 3000 og:image:height: 1688 og:image:alt: NASA Administrator Charles Bolden Discusses New James Webb Space Telescope og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Ancient Galaxies Revealed by Webb Unveil Clues About What Happened Just After The Big Bang twitter:description: Astronomers spot a galactic quartet dating to just 400 million years after the Big Bang twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt3dedf5c5b9ffac32/698a38c0b21a9c67a6506c5d/WebbMirror.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Ancient Galaxies Revealed by Webb Unveil Clues About What Happened Just After The Big Bang > Sponsored content. 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Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-network-2026q3/newsletters?i=023a5083-8d35-493e-882d-8a8ca4aca0b9&cr=time-nl-network-2026q3-v1) ## Video: Innovator of the Year: Gregory Robinson and The James Webb Space Telescope [Watch (HLS stream): Innovator of the Year: Gregory Robinson and The James Webb Space Telescope](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/vvFzrrBk.m3u8) (4:23)  _Published 2022-12-07. TIME's 2022 Innovator of the Year is Gregory Robinson and The James Webb Telescope_  by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger Editor at Large Dec 13, 2022 7:12 PM UTC  by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger Editor at Large Dec 13, 2022 7:12 PM UTC The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has ticked a lot of boxes in the near year it’s been aloft. Fly safely to its appointed spot in space 1.6 million km (1 million mi.) from Earth? Check. Successfully deploy its mirror, scientific instruments, and tennis court-sized sun shield? Check. Begin returning [eye-popping images](https://time.com/6196675/five-james-webb-telescope-images-explained/) like none ever seen before? Check. Now, the Webb has delivered on its biggest promise to date. According to a new, not-yet peer-reviewed paper [on the pre-publication website arXiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.04480), and presented on Dec. 12 at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Webb’s mission control, the telescope has spotted and confirmed the four oldest galaxies ever seen—galaxies which date back an average of just 400 million years (some even earlier) after the Big Bang, which occurred 13.8 billion years ago. “This is the way the galaxies would have appeared 13.4 billion years ago,” says lead author Brant Robertson, professor of astronomy and physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “\[With Webb\] you can rewind the clock and see them as they were back then. That’s what we’re trying to do by taking these observations: we’re looking back in time.” The new findings show not only that galaxies started forming as early as 325 million years after the Big Bang, but that there are likely ones that are older still—bringing astronomers closer to discovering the actual birth date of the very first galaxies. **Read more:** [_The James Webb Telescope Team: Innovator of the Year 2022_](https://time.com/innovator-of-the-year-2022-james-webb-telescope/) This discovery is the result of work conducted by the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), an international team of more than 80 astronomers from 10 countries who used 10 days of observation to study a deep field of 100,000 galaxies first imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2010\. Apparent size, faintness, and distance of many of the galaxies suggested that they were fantastically old, but Hubble, which sees principally in visible light, didn’t have the instrumentation to image them clearly or determine their age. That’s because visible light from so far away can’t easily penetrate the intervening dust of interstellar space. Infrared radiation, however, cuts right through the dust. This allows Webb— a telescope which detects energy in that frequency—to see as far as 13.6 billion light-years distant. Using two instruments aboard the Webb—the [Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam)](https://webb.nasa.gov/content/observatory/instruments/nircam.html) and the [Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec)](https://webb.nasa.gov/content/observatory/instruments/nirspec.html)—Robertson and his colleagues focused on four galaxies that appeared especially small, faint, and distant, studying what is known as their red shift. As objects move toward us in space, the wavelength of light they emit is compressed, shifting it to the bluer end of the visible spectrum. As objects move away from us, the wavelength is stretched, shifting it toward the red end. The redder an object appears, the more distant and old it is in our still-expanding universe. Red shift is a tricky thing to measure, because it has no particular units like inches or nanometers. Instead, it is just a number that indicates how stretched the wavelength of the light is. An object like Jupiter, which is pretty much stationary in the sky relative to Earth, has a red shift of zero. The higher the number, the greater the movement of an object away from Earth. The cosmic background radiation, a burst of universe-wide energy that was released just 380,000 years or so after the Big Bang has a red shift of about 1,100\. “For most galaxies,” says Robertson, “the highest red shifts \[or the oldest galaxies\] we had spectra for were at six, seven, or eight.” Against those relatively modest standards, the four galaxies Robertson’s team imaged blew the doors off the old record, weighing in with red shifts of 10.38, 11.58, 12.63, and 13.2\. Those numbers put the galaxies on a continuum from about 450 million years after the Big Bang—13.35 billion years ago—to 325 million years after the Big Band, or 13.475 billion years ago. “These are well beyond what we could have imagined finding before \[Webb\],” said Robertson in a statement accompanying the release of the paper. **Read more:** [_Scientists Learn More About the History of Stars in Latest Webb Telescope Images_](https://time.com/6203311/james-webb-telescope-images-stars-history/) The galaxies are impressive by dint their age, but not by dint of their size and mass. “The Milky Way is a few tens of billions of times the mass of the sun in stars,” says Robertson. “These galaxies are 100 million to a billion times the mass of the sun in stars.” The explanation for that is a straightforward one. Astronomers don’t yet know exactly when the first dust and gas began to accrete into galactic clouds, and stars then accreted within them, but the newly measured quartet emerged very early in that process. “The universe just wasn’t building big galaxies at that point,” Robertson says. “There was not a lot of time \[for larger galaxies to form\].” The team not only measured the mass of the galaxies, but also used the NIRSpec to determine their chemical makeup. As would be expected for galaxies so early in their development phase, the principle components were hydrogen and helium, without enough time for the early stars within them to have developed heavier elements. “They are relatively metal-poor,” says Robertson, “with fewer heavy elements compared to the sun.” The findings as a whole, promise still bigger discoveries—and still older galaxies—to come in the 20-some years Webb is expected to remain operational. “For us, this really was a paradigm shift in the way we were thinking about the high-red shift universe,” says Robertson. “Because we know for certain that there are some galaxies to be studied only a couple of hundred million years after the Big Bang.” ## Transcript We promised a telescope that was a hundred times more powerful than what we've had before, but not only, is it working. This is better than we expected, time to self. James Webb begins a voyage back to the birth of the universe. The first science images that we released in July the president, rolling this out. That's a pretty big deal. The world is really end of this telescope and is along for the ride and wants to know, what the next stop on the road trip, is When was the the real driver? Let's get this thing done. Whatever it takes their issues along the way long before I came on and and no one religion. When you want to do both things, that's really would be some unprecedented risk. And you just try to minimize as much as possible. That's what the team did. They are, they did an excellent job with it. We do a lot of comparisons to I will rightfully so because then I was supposed to be Premier for 30 years Weber's. Probably twice the size of Hubble close to half. The mass was Bubbles and Laura, KB and web is a million miles out, but to see the difference in Clarity and the difference of what you see, and the difference in how quickly you can get the same image, it was thrilling to see those. For Dave Mustaine there's no joystick. It's it's not like anybody's, you know what a little more, the left little the right, it's more like a playlist. We have a very detailed playlist or set of recipes. Every minute of the time is scripted, is in one of those recipes and we schedule the telescope that a week at a time. On launch day, I was here for us. The moment that was so beautiful. That first. Oh my gosh. Things are just going to go. Well on this project was the separation from the launch vehicle that's when this crowd cheered for life. I did not. I don't know if that was just confidence in the team and and the systems and the thrill of Separation than solo race. The Star by blowing, now taking its pursuit of cosmological Discovery and it was the first day that we got to see the images that were going to go public. We all crowded around the corner and it was just gorgeous. For science perspective, star formation. And you're getting a sea star cluster formation within Galaxy. I'm taking out, but I'm also just like, oh my gosh, this is going to show everybody that it works. Off work would fix my whole life and there was no better seen than to see a bunch of Geeks. Just fall over themselves with joy. It's a new window into the history of our universe and today we're going to get a glimpse of the first light to shine through that window light from other worlds orbiting Stars far beyond her own president spending time to talk to us about Webb and roll this out to the world quite quite satisfied, a real sense of our own Galaxy formed our own solar system than our sun on our planets form or not. And lastly, I think we're going to learn so many new questions that we have to go off and try to answer. 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