Every JWST photo is a window into the past.
Every image James Webb captures is a window into the past — not a metaphor, actual history. Light travels fast, but space is enormous. By the time light from a distant galaxy reaches us, billions of years have already passed. Webb detects infrared light from galaxies so far away that what we're seeing left them over 13 billion years ago. Those galaxies appear as they were shortly after the universe itself began. We're not reconstructing the past from clues — we're receiving its actual light, right now. To do this, Webb sits about one and a half million kilometres from Earth, kept extraordinarily cold so its instruments can sense those faint, ancient signals without interference. Every observation is, in the most literal sense, time travel — backwards, at the speed of light. Follow Deep Field Vault for more of the universe's stranger truths.