Look at the sky. Most of us just see dots. But when the first full-color picture of the creation—or at least, the closest thing we’ve ever seen to the dawn of time—dropped from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in July 2022, the world collectively lost its mind. It wasn't just a pretty screensaver. It was a data-heavy look back at 13 billion years of history. Honestly, it’s kinda terrifying how much we didn’t know about our own origins until a giant gold mirror started floating a million miles away from Earth.
Space is big. Really big. You’ve probably heard that before, but seeing "Deep Field" images makes that reality hit home in a way that words can't.
When people search for a picture of the creation, they’re usually looking for the Pillars of Creation or the SMACS 0723 cluster. These aren't just snapshots. They are infrared time machines. Because light takes time to travel, looking at these images is literally looking into the past. We are seeing galaxies as they were when the universe was just a "toddler," maybe a few hundred million years old. That sounds like a lot, but in cosmic terms? It’s a blink.
The Pillars of Creation: Not What You Think
You've definitely seen this one. It’s the iconic image of three towering clouds of gas and dust. NASA first made this famous with Hubble back in 1995. But the JWST picture of the creation in this region—the Eagle Nebula—changed the game entirely.
Hubble saw the dust. It looked like solid, ominous mountains.
Webb sees through it.
Because the JWST operates in the near-infrared and mid-infrared spectrum, it can peer through those thick clouds of soot. What we found inside were thousands of sparkling red orbs. Those are "protostars." They are literally stars being born. It’s a messy, violent process where clumps of mass collapse under their own gravity, heat up, and eventually ignite.
It’s not peaceful. It’s a chaotic nursery.
The "fingers" at the top of the pillars are actually larger than our entire solar system. Imagine that. Everything you know, every person who ever lived, every ocean and mountain, would be a tiny, invisible speck inside just the tip of one of those ghostly towers.
Why the Deep Field Image Broke Physics
The first deep field picture of the creation released by the Biden administration was SMACS 0723. At first glance, it looks like a bunch of smudges. But if you look closer, some of those smudges are stretched. They look like they’ve been pulled like taffy.
This is "gravitational lensing."
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Basically, the massive cluster of galaxies in the foreground is so heavy that it warps the fabric of space-time. It acts like a giant magnifying glass. It bends the light from galaxies behind it, allowing us to see things that are way too faint to be seen otherwise.
Some of these galaxies existed just 300 million years after the Big Bang.
For a long time, astronomers like Dr. Jane Rigby and the team at Goddard Space Flight Center thought early galaxies would be small and clumpy. Kind of like cosmic scrap metal. But the newest picture of the creation suggests they were actually quite organized and much more massive than predicted. This is a bit of a headache for cosmologists. If galaxies grew that big that fast, our "Standard Model" of how the universe started might need a serious rewrite.
We might be wrong about how fast stars form.
The Infrared Secret
Why can’t we just use a regular camera? Well, the universe is expanding. As it expands, the light traveling through it gets stretched. By the time light from the "beginning" reaches us, it has stretched so much that it’s no longer visible to the human eye. It has moved into the infrared part of the spectrum.
If you tried to take a picture of the creation with a normal camera, you’d see a whole lot of nothing.
The JWST has to stay incredibly cold to detect this heat. It has a sunshield the size of a tennis court to block the heat from the Sun, Earth, and Moon. If the telescope were even slightly warm, its own heat would drown out the faint signals from the edge of the universe.
It’s sitting at "Lagrange Point 2."
It’s a stable spot in space where gravity from the Earth and Sun balance out. It stays in line with Earth as we orbit the Sun.
Misconceptions About "The Beginning"
A lot of people think a picture of the creation shows the actual Big Bang. It doesn't.
We can't "see" the Big Bang with light. For the first 380,000 years, the universe was a hot, dense soup of plasma. Light couldn't travel through it. It was opaque. Think of it like being in a very thick fog. You can’t see the source of a flashlight because the light just bounces around the fog droplets.
The first "light" we can see is the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB).
What JWST shows us is the "Reionization" period. This is when the first stars turned on and started "clearing the fog." It’s the transition from a dark, cold void into a universe filled with light. That’s why these images are so vital. They show the moment the lights were flipped on.
What These Images Mean for You
It’s easy to feel small when looking at a picture of the creation. Each tiny dot in the background is a galaxy. Each galaxy has billions of stars. Each star likely has planets.
The sheer scale is impossible to wrap your head around.
But there’s a practical side to this too. By studying these early stars, we learn how heavy elements were made. The carbon in your DNA, the oxygen you’re breathing, and the iron in your blood didn't exist at the start. They were forged inside the hearts of the stars you see in these photos.
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We are literally looking at our own chemical ancestors.
When you see a picture of the creation, you aren't looking at something "out there." You’re looking at where you came from.
How to Explore These Images Yourself
Don't just look at low-res versions on social media. To actually appreciate the depth, you need to go to the source.
- Visit the Webb Space Telescope Gallery: NASA, ESA, and CSA maintain a public archive at WebbTelescope.org. They provide "Full Res" TIFF files that are sometimes over 100MB. The detail is staggering.
- Use the ESA Sky Tool: This is a professional-grade interface that lets you zoom from a view of the night sky all the way down into the pixels of a picture of the creation. It’s like Google Earth for the universe.
- Compare Hubble vs. Webb: Look for "side-by-side" comparisons of the Carina Nebula or the Southern Ring Nebula. Seeing how infrared reveals hidden structures that visible light misses is the best way to understand the technology.
- Check the Metadata: If you're a nerd for details, look at the filters used (like F150W or F444W). These tell you exactly which wavelength of infrared light was captured to create the colors you see.
The next time a new picture of the creation hits the news, remember that you're looking at a puzzle piece. Scientists are currently using these images to measure how fast the universe is expanding—a value known as the Hubble Constant. Currently, different methods of measuring this give different results. This "Hubble Tension" is one of the biggest mysteries in science. These pictures might be the only way to solve it.
Stop scrolling through the thumbnails. Download a high-resolution file, put it on a big screen, and just sit with it for five minutes. It changes how you think about your Tuesday morning.