James Webb Space Telescope: looking far beyond the stars
Space continues to be the final frontier for human exploration. We might not be able to go far – the Moon is the furthest humanity has traveled to – but we can use robotic eyes to peer billions of light-years back in space and time.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the latest multinational effort at putting a large telescope in space, far beyond Earth’s obscuring atmosphere to allow it to get much clearer images than ground-based telescopes. JWST’s infrared cameras can see through interstellar dust clouds that obscure visible light. Its huge sunshade, the size of a tennis court, shields it from stray light from the Sun and Earth. The main mirror has six times the light-gathering capacity of the older Hubble space telescope, allowing it to detect very faint galaxies from the early universe.
The image above shows the iconic Pillars of Creation, a star-forming region where gas clouds collapse to form clusters of stars. The left side shows the original image from Hubble while the right shows the JSWT image and its much higher resolving capability.
The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) runs the mission and science operations of the JWST on behalf of NASA, the American space agency. For the latest images from JWST and the latest information, check out these links below:
Links
Latest JWST images by STScI: https://webbtelescope.org/resource-gallery/images
NASA JWST project page: https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/multimedia/images.html
