It has been an exciting week with the release of photos of the universe.
The images below give us a glimpse of distant galaxies that were 13 billion years old.
It's a good time to appreciate our first class ticket to the depths of the Universe and how these images allow us to look back in time.
(NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI)
The SMACS-0723 deep field image was only taken for 12.5 hours. More than 13 billion years ago, the light in this image came from a group of galaxies.
The expansion of the Universe has an impact on how we calculate distances.
Space researchers look back in time and it's what they do every day.
One of the best known rules of physics is the speed of light. When we talk about light, we're actually referring to the entire spectrum, which travels around 300,000 kilometers per second.
Light is so fast that it seems to be instantaneous. It takes some time to travel across the universe.
You can see the moon as it was 1.3 seconds ago. It is only a small glimpse back in time. The light particles from the Sun's surface travel just over eight minutes before they reach Earth.
The universe is 100,000 light-years long. The newborn stars seen in the image are thousands of light years away.
The first ever writing is thought to have been invented in ancient Mesopotamia around 2,000 years ago.
The Carina Nebula is a birthplace for stars. (NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI)
We look back in time to how things used to be. Light can be used to try to puzzle together the mystery of our Universe.
Space-based telescopes allow us to see light that can't be seen through the atmosphere. The Hubble space telescope uses both visible and visible parts of the spectrum.
The goal was to use a wide range of light. This is one of the reasons the JWST can see further back in time.
(NASA, J. Olmsted, STScI)
The spectrum with Hubble's range. Hubble is designed to look at shorter wavelength. Two telescopes complement each other and give us a better view of the Universe.
Galaxies emit a wide range of frequencies on the spectrum. Information about the different physics in a galaxy is given by all of these.
When we're close to the stars, their light hasn't changed much, and we can look at a wide range of wavelength to understand what's going on inside them.
We can't have that luxury when we're far away. Due to the expansion of the Universe the light from the most distant galaxies has been stretched to longer and redder wavelength.
As the Universe grew, some of the light that would have been visible to our eyes lost its energy. It is now in a different part of the spectrum. This is a phenomenon.
This is where the JWST is at its best. Hubble couldn't see the entire universe because it couldn't see the wide range of IR wavelength detected by the JWST. You have the most powerful time machine in the known Universe if you combine this capability with the JWST's huge mirror.
We will be able to see light from a long time ago with the help of the JWST.
You're going to be hurt by the fact that the galaxies are not that far away. It would take 46 billion light-years to get there.
It's difficult to work on a large scale due to the discrepancy.
Dark energy is expanding the universe. It's thought to be a universal constant, acting in all areas of space time.
Dark energy effects the Universe's expansion. Even though the Universe is 13 billion years old, it is actually 93 billion light years across.
We can see the effects of dark energy on a much larger scale than we can on a small scale.
There is a remarkable time of technology in our lives. We didn't know there were other planets. We are spoilt for choice now that we know there are trillions.
We will be taking a journey through space and time each and every week.
Sara is a research fellow at the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing at the university.
Under a Creative Commons license, this article is re-posted. The original article is worth a read.
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