In 2004, the Hubble Telescope released its Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (HUDF) image, showing about 10,000 galaxies in a field of “empty space” (no visible stars). It had trained its eye on this particular region from September 2003 to January 2004, and the image included light from galaxies that existed about 13 billion years ago. The field is now known as the MIRI Deep Imaging Survey (MIDIS) region, reported by several news agencies.
The image produced was “observed with the three shortest-wavelength filters of Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) for nearly 100 hours in total. This included Webb’s longest observation of an extragalactic field in one filter so far [41 hours], producing one of the deepest views ever obtained of the Universe. Combined with data from Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), this image allows astronomers to explore how galaxies formed and evolved over billions of years,” reported ESA Webb on Aug. 1.
Now, new data made available by the James Webb Space Telescope and analyzed by a team of scientists have added at least 2,500 additional galaxies, which were discernable by the special infra-red imagers aboard the Webb. These new images indicate that these ancient galaxies came into existence when the Universe was just a few hundred million years old, according to the current “Big Bang” theory, which raises the question as to how such well-developed galaxies were able to form in that period of time. The new findings from the survey are published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
