2 min read Innovation

A New Vision of the Universe is Captured by the James Webb Space Telescope

NASA’s successor to the Hubble at 30 years and nearly $10 billion in the making, the James Webb Space Telescope is equipped to study the first stars and galaxies and look for nearer, potentially habitable worlds.
A New Vision of the Universe is Captured by the James Webb Space Telescope

The universe was born in darkness 13.8 billion years ago, and even after the first stars and galaxies blazed into existence a few hundred million years later, these too stayed dark. Their brilliant light, stretched by time and the expanding cosmos, dimmed into the infrared, rendering them — and other clues to our beginnings — inaccessible to every eye and instrument. Until now, writes The New York Times.

Webb Telescope Reveals a New Vision of an Ancient Universe (The New York Times)

Excerpt from The New York Times: On Tuesday the James Webb Space Telescope, the most powerful space observatory yet built, offered a spectacular slide show of our previously invisible nascent cosmos. Ancient galaxies carpeting the sky like jewels on black velvet. Fledgling stars shining out from deep within cumulus clouds of interstellar dust. Hints of water vapor in the atmosphere of a remote exoplanet. Their sum is both a new vision of the universe and a view of the universe as it once appeared new. "That was always out there," said Jane Rigby, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and the telescope’s operations manager. "We just had to build a telescope to go see what was there."
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According to TIME, Webb’s cameras can look deep into space and far into the past. Webb has the capacity to look 13.6 billion light years distant—which will be the farthest we’ve ever seen into space. Since light takes a long time to travel so far, we are seeing the galaxies not as they look today, but as they looked 13.1 billion years ago. These images offer some of the most detailed glimpses into the beginnings of our universe ever seen.

These 5 Photos From the James Webb Space Telescope Are Mind-Blowing. Here's What They Can Tell Us (TIME)

The first images from the James Webb Space Telescope are just a preview of the impressive capabilities of NASA’s $10 billion, next-generation observatory. Billed as the successor to the iconic Hubble Space Telescope, which launched into orbit in 1990, Webb was designed to peer deeper into space than ever before, with powerful instruments that can capture previously undetectable details in the cosmos, reports NBC News.

Photos: How pictures from the Webb telescope compare to Hubble’s (NBC News)

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