Webb will expand on the work of other observatories such as Kepler, TESS, Hubble, and ALMA, seeking out and imaging exoplanets within the known universe. We could get a big surprise way out there in the early universe.” But where did dark matter and energy come from? And we don’t know that that’s the only stuff out there. We have a pretty good story called the Standard Model, where dark matter, dark energy, ordinary matter, and gravity are pulling things together after the Big Bang. “We have lots of reasons to be skeptical of our understanding of the early universe. “Every time scientists build a new instrument, we discover something new,” said Mather. Hubble’s visible and infrared views of the Monkey Head Nebula. There is also the added advantage that infrared light is scattered less by dust compared to visible and ultraviolet light, which will allow scientists to not only see previously obstructed objects, but to probe clouds of dust where stars and planets are born. “Infrared is important for astronomers because cooler objects that cannot glow or emit visible light are able to emit infrared.” “It opens up what I called the infrared treasure chest,” said John Mather, lead scientist on the James Webb Telescope and Nobel Prize winner for his work on the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite, in an interview. Infrared detection will also expand astronomers’ observational capabilities. This new ability to observe ancient starlight will allow scientists to look back to where the first objects may have been formed in time. Through a process called cosmological redshifting, ultraviolet and visible light emitted by cosmic objects is stretched toward the infrared region of the spectrum as the universe expands. As the first general purpose infrared telescope, Webb will take us back to the realm of the very first stars and galaxies, which formed when the universe was a mere 100,000,000 years old. Webb will take this a step further, complimenting Hubble’s capabilities, which observes the universe primarily through visible and ultraviolet light. As the first orbiting telescope, Hubble caused a revolution in astronomy, most notably with its famous Deep Field images. As a result, telescopes, like Hubble and Webb, can be used to capture snapshots from the early universe, providing a glimpse back in time.īefore Hubble was launched in 1990, astronomers relied on ground telescopes, which, comparatively, cannot peer very far into the cosmos because the Earth’s atmosphere absorbs most of the short wavelength light needed to detect faraway galaxies, stars, black holes, and planets. Since the distance between objects in space is so large, it takes light a significant amount of time to travel between them. Telescopes can be thought of as time machines. “It is destined to be a household name, like its predecessor, Hubble,” wrote NASA scientists. Fitted with a powerful suite of instruments, it will see further into the universe than any other telescope, and will be used to solve mysteries in our solar system, probe the origins of the universe, and push the boundaries of scientific knowledge. Three decades in the making, NASA’s successor to the famous Hubble telescope will launch next week, and the excitement is building.Ī joint program between NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency, the James Webb Space Telescope - or Webb for short - will be the largest, most complex space observatory to date.
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