James Webb Telescope captures over 45,000 galaxies in one frame

The James Webb Space Telescope of NASA has shared a picture showing over 45,000 galaxies in one frame. The telescope captured the image as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey programme. 

The image captured was of a portion of the sky known as GOODS-Sout.

NASA said that around 32 days of the James Webb telescope time will be devoted to the JADES programme to uncover and characterise distant and faint galaxies.

Hundreds of galaxies have already been discovered that existed when the universe hadn’t completed 600 million years.

JADES programme co-lead Professor Tucson Marcia Rieke said, “With JADES, we want to answer a lot of questions, like: How did the earliest galaxies assemble themselves? How fast did they form stars? Why do some galaxies stop forming stars?” 

Previously, the part of the sky was observed by the Hubble telescope.

“For hundreds of millions of years after the big bang, the universe was filled with a gaseous fog that made it opaque to energetic light. By one billion years after the big bang, the fog had cleared and the universe became transparent, a process known as reionisation. Scientists have debated whether active, supermassive black holes or galaxies full of hot, young stars were the primary cause of reionisation,” the NASA said.