Scientist explains how aliens will let us communicate with planets found by James Webb Space Telescope

Aliens are at the core of making the James Webb Space Telescope discoveries something we can deal with, with one leading scientist explaining exactly the role they'd play.

The James Webb Space Telescope, launched just over two years ago by NASA at a cost of $10 billion (£8 billion), spends its days taking super hi-res photos of deep space as humanity looks to broaden its understanding of how the cosmos works and where we all came from.

In using its Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) to make this a reality, the JWST sends images from billions of light years away.

Black holes, volatile stars, and new planets are among its regular findings, with the power of the instrument truly phenomenal.

In capturing these images, the JWST is in fact acting as a real life time machine. It's a bit mind-blowing, but it all comes down to how light travels. What is being captured by the telescope is light that has, in some cases, travelled billions of years to get to the telescope.

This means that what we are capturing with the instrument is a snapshot of how the objects looked, rather than how they look now.

One such example is a recent discovery of the presence of carbon from just 350 million years after the start of the universe. Given that the universe itself is about 13.8 billion years old, it means the images captured of the discovery are roughly 13.45 billion years old. Are we following?

The James Webb Space Telescope being constructed before launching in to the cosmos (NASA/Desiree Stover)

Now, because of this time lag between light leaving a source and arriving in the lens of the JWST, there is close to zero chance of ever interacting with what we're finding through the telescope.

But hope remains. And that hope comes down to the discovery of alien life.

Tony Ord, a philosopher and senior researcher at Oxford University, explained exactly how aliens would be the missing link in making the JWST discoveries contactable.

In a length thread over on X (formerly Twitter), Ord wrote: "The James Webb Space Telescope has started capturing images of galaxies so far away that they are causally disconnected from the Earth — nothing done here or there could ever interact. The latest of these, JADES-GS-z14-0, was discovered at the end of May this year. It is located 34 billion light years away — almost three quarters of the way to the edge of the observable universe.

A pair of twin stars recently discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope (U.S. NSF / NSF NRAO / B. Saxton)

"The light we are capturing was released by the galaxy about 13.5 billion years ago — just 0.3 billion years after the Big Bang. So we are seeing a snapshot of how it looked in the early days of the universe.

"Because the space between us is stretching, the current distance to the galaxy is 15 times larger than it was when the light began its journey towards us. That's how it can be 34 billion light years away when the light has only travelled for 13.5 billion years. The expansion of space makes it hard for anything, even light, to cross the vast gulfs between distant galaxies, as the distance you need to cross keeps growing. Because the expansion is accelerating, eventually the remaining distance grows too fast to ever cross.

"If we shine a torch up at the night sky, some of the photons released will eventually leave our galaxy and travel for a vast distance. They will eventually be able to reach any galaxy that is currently within 16.5 billion light years of us. I call this region that we can affect 'The Affectable Universe', and in many ways it is the twin to the Observable Universe. Each year, more galaxies slip beyond our reach, as a photon released next year will no longer be ever able to reach them."

The James Webb Space Telescope is floating through the universe taking images of brand new discoveries (NASA/Getty Stock Images)

Ord continued: "JADES-GS-z14-0 is well beyond the edge of the affectable universe. Nothing we send out can ever reach it or affect it.

"We've seen galaxies beyond this distance for a long time. Many of the smaller galaxies in the Hubble Deep Field below are forever beyond out reach.

"But events here and contemporaneous events in those small galaxies *can* interact — if being in both galaxies set off towards each other at near the speed of light, they could eventually meet in the middle. Or if we both sent signals, an alien civilisation in the middle could receive both and combine them. In other words, it is still possible to causally interact with each other.

"This is also what we saw with the star 'Earendel' — the first individual star to be identified that was beyond our affectable universe. But JADES-GS-z14-0 is slightly more than *twice* as far as the edge of the affectable universe. So the affectable universe around us and the affectable universe around them don't overlap at all. So there is no longer a way to interact at all.

"Of course, we can still see these baby photos of their galaxy, but no matter how long we wait, we'll never see them grow up to our current age. If we waited, we'd see the evolution of their galaxy slow down asymptotically and never get to be 13.8 billion years old. Of course, they'd keep getting older, but the 'postcards' (photons) they send us get delayed longer and longer by the expanding distance they have to cover, so come in less and less frequently, and recent postcards will never arrive."

It's a stretch to say the least, but the discovery of a highly advanced alien civilisation could be the way to achieving the end goal of interplanetary communication.