The Hubble Deep Field is the deepest image of the universe we have
The core idea stands, but key numbers or details have changed.
TaughtOur deepest look into the cosmos is the Hubble Space Telescope's Deep Field: a tiny patch of sky stared at for days, revealing thousands of distant galaxies. It is the benchmark image of how far back we can see.
NowOn 11 July 2022, NASA released Webb's First Deep Field of the cluster SMACS 0723: the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the universe ever taken, reaching fainter and earlier galaxies than Hubble's deepest fields, in about 12.5 hours rather than weeks.
What actually happened
The James Webb Space Telescope collects infrared light with a mirror far larger than Hubble's, so it sees the stretched, reddened light of the earliest galaxies that Hubble simply could not gather. In a patch of sky the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length, the cluster's gravity acts as a lens, magnifying galaxies seen as they were when the universe was under a billion years old.
This is 'updated,' not a correction of an error; Hubble's Deep Fields were and are real landmarks, and Webb builds directly on them. What changed is the benchmark: the deepest image of the universe is no longer a Hubble frame, and Webb has been pushing that horizon further ever since.
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Who was taught this
Still standard through 2022, so anyone who finished school between 1950 and 2022 learned the earlier version.