It’s no exaggeration to say the James Webb Area Telescope (JWST) represents a brand new period for contemporary astronomy.
Launched on Dec, 25, 2021, and absolutely operational since July 2022, the telescope presents glimpses of the universe that have been inaccessible to us earlier than. Just like the Hubble Area Telescope, the JWST is in space, so it will probably take footage with beautiful element free from the distortions of Earth’s environment.
Nevertheless, whereas Hubble is in orbit round Earth at an altitude of 335 miles (540 kilometers), the JWST is sort of 1 million miles (1.5 million km) distant, far past the Moon. From this place, away from the interference of our planet’s mirrored warmth, it will probably acquire mild from throughout the universe far into the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.
This skill, when mixed with the JWST’s bigger mirror, state-of-the-art detectors, and lots of different technological advances, permits astronomers to look again to the universe’s earliest epochs.
Because the universe expands, it stretches the wavelength of sunshine travelling in direction of us, making extra distant objects seem redder. At nice sufficient distances, the sunshine from a galaxy is shifted totally out of the seen a part of the electromagnetic spectrum to the infrared. The JWST is ready to probe such sources of sunshine proper again to the earliest instances, almost 14 billion years in the past.
The Hubble telescope continues to be an excellent scientific instrument and might see at optical wavelengths the place the JWST can not. However the Webb telescope can see a lot additional into the infrared with larger sensitivity and sharpness.
Let’s take a look at ten photographs which have demonstrated the staggering energy of this new window to the universe.
