James Webb Space Telescope discovers 717 ancient galaxies that flooded the universe with 1st light

This infrared image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) shows a portion of an area of the sky known as GOODS-South.  More than 45,000 galaxies are visible here. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Brant Robertson (UC Santa Cruz), Ben Johnson (CfA), Sandro Tacchella (Cambridge), Marcia Rieke (University of Arizona), Daniel Eisenstein (CfA))

The James Webb Telescope (JWST or Webb) has unveiled hundreds of ancient galaxies that could be among the first members of the universe — a leap from only a handful that were previously known to exist at the time.

As early as 600 million years after the Big Bang, these very young galaxies flaunted complex structures and clusters of star formation, a new study reports. The study is part of an international collaboration called the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), which gathered a month's worth of observations from two tiny patches in the sky: One in the Ursa Minor constellation and another in the direction of the Fornax cluster. Within this region were over 700 newly discovered young galaxies that reveal with the cosmos looked like in its earliest