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What it’s: The Hubble Ultra Deep Field, revisited by the James Webb Space Telescope
Where it’s: Close to the Big Dipper within the night time sky
When it was shared: Aug. 1, 2025
The James Webb Space Telescope‘s (JWST) newest extragalactic survey has revealed fainter and extra distant objects than ever earlier than, some relationship again to the earliest intervals of the universe. But it stands on the shoulders of an enormous: When NASA revealed the Hubble Ultra Deep Field picture in 2004, it shocked the world of astronomy. A composite of 800 pictures from exposures totaling 11 days, the deep picture of an in any other case unremarkable a part of the night time sky revealed practically 10,000 galaxies, many among the many most distant recognized.
Now, JWST has noticed that very same patch of sky with totally different eyes — and located 2,500 extra objects. Crucially, they’re much more distant.
JWST’s new tackle the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, named the MIRI Deep Imaging Survey (MIDIS), is the deepest-ever mid-infrared picture of that a part of the night time sky.
The extraordinary new picture is the results of practically 100 hours of observing time utilizing the area observatory’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) and Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). It contains a whole lot of extraordinarily crimson galaxies, a few of which can date again to lower than a billion years after the Big Bang.
Related: 42 jaw-dropping James Webb Space Telescope images
At the core of the composite image is one ultralong exposure. Using just one of MIRI’s filters, JWST took an exposure of the night sky for 41 hours — the longest single-filter observation it has performed of an extragalactic field to date. The plan was to capture galaxies in mid-infrared light — something neither Hubble nor human eyes can detect — which also revealed previously unseen regions of dust and old, red stars.
Capturing light in wavelengths beyond the capabilities of human vision always brings a problem: How can we even begin to look at it? Processing such images requires filters that assign a different color to each different wavelength of light. In this image, galaxies rich in dust and star-forming activity are orange and red, extremely distant compact galaxies are greenish, and galaxies bright in the near-infrared are blue and cyan.
Researchers described the image in a paper in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, together with a slider tool, a pan video and a transition video with the Hubble Ultra Deep Field for comparability.
For extra elegant area pictures, try our Space Photo of the Week archives.