Revealed: hundreds of billions of stars. Now let’s search them for life | Louisa Preston

For astrobiologists like me, the first image from Nasa's James Webb Space Telescope reveals infinite possibilities of life beyond Earth

This week the James Webb Space Telescope made history, proving itself to be the most powerful space-based observatory humanity has ever built and revealing a tiny sliver of the vast universe around us in breathtaking detail. Astronomers the world over have been shown cheering, in floods of tears and lost for words. Astrobiologists like myself, who study the origins, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe, are getting pretty excited too. By revealing images of galaxies from the dawn of time and chemical data of planetary atmospheres, the JWST has the power to help us answer one of humanity's oldest questions: are we alone in the universe?

The first spectacular image released was of the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, known as Webb's First Deep Field. This image covers just a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length by someone on the ground - and yet it is crowded with galaxies, literally thousands of them. Within each galaxy, there could be on average 100 billion stars, each with its own family of planets and moons orbiting them.

Louisa Preston teaches planetary science and astrobiology at the UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory