Enlarge / The James Webb Space Telescope continues to deliver on its promises on discovering early galaxies. (credit: NASA)

Data from the Webb Space Telescope has only gotten into the hands of astronomers over the last few weeks, but they've been waiting for years for this, and apparently had analyses set to go. The result has been something like a race back in time, as new discoveries find objects that formed ever closer to the Big Bang that produced our Universe. Last week, one of these searches turned up a galaxy that was present less than 400 million years after the Big Bang. This week, a new analysis has picked out a galaxy as it appeared only 233 million years after the Universe popped into existence.

The discovery is a happy byproduct of work that was designed to answer a more general question: How many galaxies should we expect to see at different time points after the Big Bang?

Back in time

As we mentioned last week, the early Universe was opaque to light at any wavelengths that carry more energy than is needed to ionize hydrogen. That energy is in the UV portion of the spectrum, but the red shift caused by 13 billion years of an expanding Universe has shifted that cutoff point into the infrared portion of the spectrum. To find galaxies from this time, we have to look for objects that aren't visible at shorter infrared wavelengths (meaning that light was once above the hydrogen cutoff), but do appear at lower-energy wavelengths.

Enlarge (credit: NASA )

After months of anticipation, and a day after President Biden himself was involved in the release of an image of the early Universe , NASA has now released four other images from the Webb Space Telescope. The agency had already told us that targets would include a couple of nebulas, a galaxy cluster, and an exoplanet.

But it wasn't clear exactly what features of these objects would be the focus of these images. Or how NASA would process the images so that features that exist in the infrared area of the spectrum can be perceived in the visible area of the spectrum. Scientists we spoke to at the Webb launch event suggested that everyone was aware that aesthetics matter and would be experimenting with different methods to do this processing in a way that balanced scientific accuracy with the wow factor everyone expects.

The results are finally being made available, and they definitely managed the wow. We'll add details about the scientific content after it's discussed at the press conference, which is currently ongoing. But we wanted to get you the images as they become available, so this story will be updated repeatedly as the morning goes along.

Enlarge (credit: Hubble Heritage Team )

On Friday, NASA continued to build the hype for next week's image release from the Webb Space Telescope by announcing the five objects that will be in the first cache of images. A few of the targets are exactly what you'd expect, given what scientists have said they want to use the telescope to image, while a couple have likely been chosen simply because they'll produce some fantastic visuals.

The target list also shows NASA's thoughts about how it can get informative data as quickly as possible. We'll give a little background on each of the targets below.

WASP-96 b: One of the most exciting features of Webb is its ability to analyze the composition of the atmospheres of exoplanets. When a planet passes between its host star and Earth, some of the star's light will pass through its atmosphere, allowing the materials in the atmosphere to absorb specific wavelengths in the star's light. This signal is tiny since only a small fraction of the star's light will pass through the atmosphere, so it will typically take months of observations to get a good signal.