What if every image you took showed the past, not the present?
Here's something that quietly rewrites how you see astronomy. When you look at a photograph, you're seeing the moment it was taken. When the James Webb Space Telescope looks outwards, it's doing something stranger — it's catching light that left its source over 13 billion years ago, before the Earth, before the Sun, before most of the universe had taken shape.
Light travels fast, but space is vast. That travel time is the trick. By the time ancient light arrives at Webb's infrared detectors, orbiting about one and a half million kilometres from Earth, the galaxies that sent it have had billions of years to change beyond recognition — or vanish entirely.
So Webb isn't just a telescope. It's a record of things that no longer exist in that form. Every observation is a fossil of time itself.
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