GOODS-North Field (NIRCam)

The GOODS-North field, located in the constellation Ursa Major, is one of two regions (alongside GOODS-South) studied as part of the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey. It’s known for deep-field imaging by the Hubble Space Telescope, which revealed thousands of galaxies spanning over 11 billion years of cosmic history. These fields help astronomers investigate galaxy formation, evolution, and the large-scale structure of the universe. This James Webb Space Telescope image, captured by the NIRCam instrument, focuses on a section of GOODS-North filled with distant galaxies. Near the lower right lies GN-z11—a galaxy seen just 430 million years after the Big Bang, making it one of the earliest and most distant ever observed. Initially identified by Hubble, GN-z11 is exceptionally bright for its time. Webb data reveal a likely cause: a central supermassive black hole roughly 2 million times the Sun’s mass, actively consuming surrounding matter. This observation may provide the first clear evidence of both a rapidly growing black hole and stars from the universe’s first generation.