The James Webb Space Telescope was launched in 2021, and ever since its first images have been released to the public in July 2022, it's been a big hit.
However, most recently astronomers noticed something different about the photographs that have been coming back. The stars and galaxies seemed to be much brighter than usual, which was a bit of a problem. Brighter light covered up many of the dimmer stars which meant that if the telescope were to do a counting of how many stars were in a particular area then the readings would come out false. At first some people thought that it may have been James Webb’s sensitive instruments that were giving the extra light, and that the telescope itself had a minor problem. But after doing a check up on the telescope nothing seemed off about its instruments or camera. Which means that James Webb was actually giving us the right information, and the early universe is just much brighter than we expected.
"The discovery of these galaxies was a big surprise because they were substantially brighter than anticipated," Claude-André Faucher-Giguère of Northwestern University said. "Typically, a galaxy is bright because it's big, but since these galaxies formed at cosmic dawn, not enough time has passed since the Big Bang.”
James Webb will continue to study the early universe looking for more discoveries like this one, who knows what it will discover next?