Webb telescope aims to answer astronomy’s ‘biggest questions’

  • Date: 11-Dec-2021
  • Source: Kuwait Times
  • Sector:Technology
  • Country:Kuwait
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Webb telescope aims to answer astronomy’s ‘biggest questions’

It’s been three decades in the making: the largest and most powerful telescope ever to be launched into space is finally ready to take up its orbit and beam back new clues to the origins of the Universe and Earth-like planets beyond our solar system. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, named for a former director of the American space agency, follows in the footsteps of the legendary Hubble – but intends to show humans what the Universe looked like even closer to its birth nearly 14 billion years ago. In a recent Tweet chat, cosmologist and astrophysicist John Mather, who co-founded the Webb project, described the telescope’s unprecedented sensitivity. “#JWST can see the heat signature of a bumblebee at the distance of the Moon,” he tweeted.

All that power is needed to detect the weak glow emitted billions of years ago by the very first galaxies to exist and the first stars being formed. Hubble is capable of observing events that happened in space some 500 million years after the Big Bang, and Webb can go back even further to around 200 million years after that event. “This telescope is designed to answer the biggest questions in astronomy today,” NASA astrophysicist