Cosmic timeline

Observatories continue to reach farther back in time to study the evolution of stars and galaxies. This illustration shows that the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys looked back billions of years to see the first galaxies. Their combined effort was part of the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS). Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), will gaze even farther back in time to the birth of the first stars.