The James Webb Space Telescope Launched on 25 December 2021, Released Its First Five Targets on 12 July 2022, and Has Since Confirmed a Galaxy 280 Million Years After the Big Bang

The James Webb Space Telescope launched at 7:20 a.m. US Eastern time (12:20 UTC) on 25 December 2021, on an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe’s Spaceport near Kourou, French Guiana. NASA released its first images and spectra on 12 July 2022, after President Joe Biden unveiled the first of them at the White House on 11 July.

In the four years since, the telescope’s data have produced a galaxy confirmed at 280 million years after the Big Bang, an unsettled argument over a class of compact red objects, and an exoplanet claim that other teams say the data do not support. This piece separates what the agencies and papers state from what is still being argued.

A month’s flight to a point a million miles out

NASA says the launch vehicle and launch site were part of the European Space Agency’s contribution to the mission. After liftoff the telescope took 29 days to travel about a million miles (1.5 million kilometres) to the second Lagrange point, called L2.

India’s solar observatory sits at a different Lagrange point of the Sun-Earth system, L1, also about 1.5 million kilometres out, as the Aditya-L1 article describes. NASA’s other recent partnership with ISRO is the radar satellite covered in the NISAR article, launched on 30 July 2025.

Eighteen hexagons and four instruments

Webb’s primary mirror is 6.5 metres (21.3 feet) across and is built from 18 hexagonal segments, according to NASA. NASA calls the sunshield tennis-court-sized.

Four instruments share the light. NASA’s instrument pages give the following ranges:

• NIRCam, the main near-infrared camera, covers 0.6 to 5 microns.
• NIRSpec, the near-infrared spectrograph, covers 0.6 to 5.3 microns.
• NIRISS, with the Fine Guidance Sensor that keeps Webb pointed, covers 0.6 to 5 microns.
• MIRI, the mid-infrared instrument, covers about 4.9 to 27.9 microns.

The five targets of 12 July 2022

The first was SMACS 0723, which NASA calls Webb’s First Deep Field. The NIRCam composite represents 12.5 hours of observing and covers a patch of sky about the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length. The cluster is shown as it looked 4.6 billion years ago, and its mass bends the light of galaxies behind it, magnifying some that NASA says date from when the universe was less than a billion years old.

The second was the Cosmic Cliffs, the edge of the star-forming region NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. NASA puts the region about 7,600 light-years away and the tallest peaks about 7 light-years high.

The third was Stephan’s Quintet, a mosaic of over 150 million pixels built from almost 1,000 image files. ESA says four of the five galaxies are about 290 million light-years away and the fifth, NGC 7320, is about 40 million light-years away. The release also covers the black hole in NGC 7319, which ESA puts at roughly 24 million solar masses, and shock waves where NGC 7318B moves through the group.

The fourth was a spectrum, not a picture. NIRISS watched the gas giant WASP-96 b cross its star for 6.4 hours on 21 June 2022. ESA says the result shows “the unambiguous signature of water,” along with haze and clouds that earlier observations had suggested were absent. The planet is about 1,150 light-years away, with less than half of Jupiter’s mass and a diameter about 1.2 times Jupiter’s.

The fifth was the Southern Ring Nebula, NGC 3132, about 2,500 light-years away. NASA says Webb’s mid-infrared view showed that the fainter of its two central stars, a white dwarf, is cloaked in dust.

Galaxies from less than 300 million years after the Big Bang

On 30 May 2024 NASA announced that Webb had confirmed JADES-GS-z14-0 at a redshift of 14.32, with an uncertainty of plus 0.08 and minus 0.20. Redshift measures how far light has been stretched on its way to us, so a higher number means a more distant, earlier galaxy. NASA put the galaxy at about 290 million years after the Big Bang and over 1,600 light-years across, with light that comes mostly from young stars.

The team’s paper, led by Stefano Carniani, appeared in Nature in 2024. Its authors write that the galaxy is unexpectedly luminous and extended, and that because stellar light dominates, black hole accretion cannot fully explain the excess of luminous early galaxies that Webb is finding.

On 28 January 2026 NASA announced a further step: MoM-z14, confirmed by NIRSpec at a redshift of 14.44, about 280 million years after the Big Bang. Rohan Naidu of MIT’s Kavli Institute led the work, published in the Open Journal of Astrophysics. The team reports unusually high nitrogen, and NASA says one theory points to supermassive stars in the dense early universe.

Little red dots, and who reads them how

Little red dots are compact, red sources found in Webb’s deep surveys, and the debate is over what powers them. Black holes detected by a different method are covered in our piece on gravitational waves. A 2023 preprint by Jorryt Matthee and colleagues found 20 of them at redshifts of about 4.2 to 5.5 with broad hydrogen emission, which the authors attribute to black holes of roughly 10 million to 100 million solar masses, and linked their redness to dust.

The black-hole reading itself is under revision. In a 2026 Nature paper, Vadim Rusakov and colleagues argue that electron scattering broadens the spectral lines, which would put the black hole masses at 100,000 to 10 million solar masses, two orders of magnitude below earlier estimates. They describe young black holes inside dense ionized gas cocoons. Kohei Inayoshi and Luis Ho, in a December 2025 preprint, conclude that dust reddening is not required and that gas-wrapped black holes can produce red spectra, with masses of about a million to 10 million solar masses.

On 10 June 2026, a team led by Vasily Kokorev of the University of Texas at Austin reported a detailed spectrum of one lensed object, GLIMPSE-17775, at redshift 3.5. ESA’s headline calls it the strongest evidence yet for “black hole stars,” meaning a growing black hole inside a dense cocoon of partly ionized gas. The ESA release notes that the study covers a single object.

Planets: water, carbon dioxide, and a disputed molecule

After WASP-96 b, NASA announced on 25 August 2022 that NIRSpec had found the first clear, detailed evidence of carbon dioxide in an exoplanet atmosphere, on WASP-39 b, about 700 light-years away. The signal is a small bump in the spectrum between 4.1 and 4.6 microns, recorded on 10 July 2022.

K2-18 b is the contested case. In an April 2025 paper accepted by The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Nikku Madhusudhan and colleagues reported mid-infrared features that fit dimethyl sulfide, dimethyl disulfide or both, gases they call potential biosignatures, at about 3 sigma. A joint reanalysis of near- and mid-infrared data by Rafael Luque and colleagues, in Astronomy and Astrophysics, found insufficient evidence for either molecule and said other methyl-bearing molecules such as ethane fit equally well. Luque’s team estimates that about 25 more MIRI transits would be needed to tell a flat spectrum from the DMS and DMDS features at 3 sigma.