Every direction you look in space is a direction into the past.
Every direction you look in space is a direction into the past. Light travels fast, but the universe is vast — so by the time any light reaches your eye, it's already old news.
The James Webb Space Telescope takes that idea to an extreme. It detects faint infrared light from galaxies so distant that the light left them over 13 billion years ago. Webb isn't seeing those galaxies as they are. It's seeing them as they were, shortly after the universe itself began.
To do that, Webb sits about one and a half million kilometres from Earth, kept cold enough to sense what is essentially ancient heat — the faint glow of the earliest cosmic structures humanity has ever observed.
No one built a time machine. We built a telescope, and it turned out to be the same thing. Follow Deep Field Vault for more of the universe.