James Webb telescope spots galaxies near the dawn of time, thrilling scientists

The new baby pictures of the universe show that the universe began to form earlier than expected.

The telescope is one million miles away from Earth. It has a giant mirror that allows it to detect faint light that has been traveling for millions of years. It can see what the universe looked like in the past.

The snapshots that have been captured so far have thrilled and perplexed scientists, because they show that the universe was very young.

Tommaso is an astronomer at the University of California Los Angeles. We are closer to understanding how it all began thanks toJWST.

The discovery of one galaxy that was 450 million years after the beginning was reported in a research paper.

The Hubble Space Telescope was able to see a galaxy called GN-z11, which was 400 million years after the Bigbang.

A member of the team that found GN-z11 said that seeing it was a huge surprise. Scientists know it wasn't just a weird outlier because they have at least two more examples.

"These galaxies are bright, and so they were hiding just under the limits of what Hubble could do," said Jane Rigby, an operations project scientist. The people were waiting for us.

Some people claim to have seen the first galaxies 250 million years after the Bigbang. Those are more cautious observations.

Illingworth says they feel very confident about these two but less so about the others. A lot of discussion is going on.

Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is the smaller of the two newly-seen ones.

Astronomers are having to rethink their ideas about the evolution of the universe after seeing many early, bright galaxies.

"It's exciting for us, from a theoretical standpoint, that maybe there are some open questions about how these galaxies could have formed their stars so much earlier that we're able to detect large numbers of them."

Astronomers spent decades and $10 billion dollars to design and launch the JWST because they wanted to understand how the universe came to be.

Illingworth says that they're on track to realize the dream of understanding the universe at the earliest times. The last few months have been exciting, but there's still a lot to learn.