JWST's deep field image broke something in my

The JWST deep field image dropped on Monday and I haven’t been the same since.

President Biden unveiled it at a White House event. NASA released it at full resolution a few hours later. I downloaded the full-res TIFF and opened it on my monitor and just sat there.

Every point of light is a galaxy.

Not a star. A galaxy. Each one containing billions of stars. Some of the galaxies in this image are 13 billion years old. Light that left those galaxies when the universe itself was only about 500 million years old. Light that’s been traveling for 13 billion years, across an expanding universe, to hit a gold mirror at L2 and be recorded as data and transmitted to Earth and displayed on my screen.

I’m looking at the beginning.

The area of sky

The JWST deep field covers an area of sky roughly the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length. That’s the part that breaks my brain. This isn’t a wide survey. This is a tiny, tiny sliver. Pick any comparable sliver anywhere else in the sky and you’d see a similar number of galaxies. The universe is that dense with structure, that full of light, everywhere you point the telescope.

Hubble’s deep field in 1995 did something similar. It showed us thousands of galaxies in a tiny patch and changed how we thought about the universe. JWST’s version goes deeper. The infrared sensitivity picks up galaxies that Hubble couldn’t see. Older. Fainter. Redder. Closer to the edge of what we can observe.

The STScI team that planned this image chose galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 as the target. The cluster’s gravity bends the light from more distant galaxies behind it, magnifying them. Gravitational lensing. The universe acting as its own telescope, bending spacetime to show us things that would otherwise be invisible.

What I keep finding

I’ve been zooming in on different sections for three days. Every time, I find something new.

Small red arcs that are distant galaxies stretched and warped by the gravitational lens. Spiral galaxies with visible arms. Elliptical galaxies glowing smooth and ancient. Things I can’t identify. Shapes that don’t match any familiar galaxy type. Objects that might be galaxies merging, caught in the act.

Three days of staring and I’m still finding new things in one image of one grain-of-sand patch of sky.

The feeling

ESA has a gallery page with multiple images released the same day. The Carina Nebula. The Southern Ring Nebula. Stephan’s Quintet. The spectrum of exoplanet WASP-96b. Each one would be the image of the decade from any other telescope.

But the deep field is the one I keep coming back to. Because it’s not showing me one beautiful object. It’s showing me everything. The sheer density of existence. Galaxies behind galaxies behind galaxies, all the way back to when the universe was young and hot and just starting to form structure.

I don’t have a conclusion. I don’t have analysis. I have an image open on my screen and a feeling I can’t articulate. Something about scale. Something about time. Something about looking at 13 billion years of light and realizing you’re part of the same process that made all of it.

I can’t stop staring.

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