How did the Big Bang make you and me possible? Are we alone, and how close are the neighbors? The vast, unexplored cosmos is fertile ground for astronomers’ imaginations. And yet, almost every important discovery came as a surprise.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), set to launch as soon as November, will attempt to answer these questions — and the ones we don’t even know to ask yet. It will crack open the treasure chest of the magnificent infrared sky, invisible to human eyes. With its great golden 6.5-meter primary mirror and its suite of cameras and spectrometers, the Webb can sense light ranging from the middle of the visible spectrum to the mid-infrared. If there were a bumblebee hovering in space at the distance of the Moon, the Webb could see both the sunlight it reflects and the heat that it emits.
As the telescope’s senior project scientist, I’ve been working with the JWST team since we started in 1995. Our discoveries will be released as they are for the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) — some immediately, some after more detailed analysis — and everyone will be able to download our images. We know where we will look, we can guess what we will find, and there will be surprises.
We will look back in time by looking far away to hunt for the first galaxies, the first stars, the first supernovae, and the first black holes. Having grown from the pure hydrogen and helium available in the early universe, these objects were very different from today’s modern examples.
We will measure the effects of dark matter and dark energy, even though we can’t see them. We will learn how galaxies grow by comparing young and old. We will watch new stars being born, looking inside the dusty clouds of gas, like the so-called Pillars of Creation, where they grow.
And we will ask how our solar system formed and how it evolved to support life. We will do this by looking at the planets and small bodies close to home, and by watching other solar systems. The infinite universe surely has life elsewhere, but where are the neighbors? If there are nearby exoplanets with liquid water, the JWST can find them.
The James Webb Space Telescope lives!
Source: Trending Update Article
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