NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is a time machine to the early universe, which uses massive golden mirrors to capture ancient light. The results will likely rewrite and expand our textbooks for years to come.
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An international project like this that has countless “firsts” takes time, but the painstaking effort to design, construct and test Webb’s optical system will be worth the wait. Overnight, the eye of the telescope will revolutionize our understanding of the cosmos and be set loose on the biggest questions in astronomy.

The astronomical community was after something that hadn’t been observed before… the early universe. The first stars and galaxies started to form 100 to 250 million years after the Big Bang, around 13.6 billion years ago. Because the universe is expanding, actually the light from the early universe gets stretched into the infrared and that's called a cosmological redshift. It's this cosmological redshift that Webb's optics will be hunting for, to uncover the story of the early universe. Infrared light can pass through dust in the universe. And so it allows us to peer through dust clouds and see, for example, stellar nurseries.

No other telescope today has the collecting power and sensitivity that NASA’s JWST has to lift the veil on the universe’s secrets. The James Webb Space telescope is sensitive enough that if there were a bumblebee at the distance of the moon, we would be able to detect it. The telescope’s core superpowers come from its advanced optical system.

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Read More:
Webb vs Hubble Telescope
https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/abo...
“Webb often gets called the replacement for Hubble, but we prefer to call it a successor. After all, Webb is the scientific successor to Hubble; its science goals were motivated by results from Hubble.”

The Five Big Ways the James Webb Telescope Will Help Astronomers Understand the Universe
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/scienc...
“The further into space scientists can look, the further back in time they can observe a galaxy. Webb, being the farthest seeing telescope yet, can root out the youngest looking galaxies humanity can observe.”

The Webb Space Telescope Will Rewrite Cosmic History. If It Works.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-na...
“The James Webb Space Telescope has been designed to answer many of the core questions that have animated astronomers over the past half-century. With a $10 billion price tag, it is one of the most ambitious engineering initiatives ever attempted. But for it to achieve its potential — nothing less than to rewrite the history of the cosmos and reshape humanity’s position within it — a lot of things have to work just right.”

The $11-billion Webb telescope aims to probe the early Universe
https://www.nature.com/articles/d4158...
“If everything goes to plan, Webb will remake astronomy by peering at cosmic phenomena such as the most distant galaxies ever seen, the atmospheres of far-off planets and the hearts of star-forming regions swaddled in dust. Roughly 100 times more powerful than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, which has transformed our understanding of the cosmos over the past 31 years, Webb will reveal previously hidden aspects of the Universe.”

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