James Webb Space Telescope
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the largest telescope in space, designed to observe the universe in infrared light. Launched on 25 December 2021, it orbits about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth near the Sun–Earth L2 Lagrange point. Webb has a 6.5-meter-diameter primary mirror made of 18 hexagonal segments coated in gold, giving it a light-collecting area about six times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope. Webb matters because it can detect objects too old, distant, or faint for Hubble, allowing astronomers to observe the first stars and galaxies and study potentially habitable exoplanets. Its infrared capabilities let it see through dust clouds and observe the early universe back to about 180 million years after the Big Bang.
Sources
- en.wikipedia.org: “The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a space telescope designed to conduct infrared astronomy. It is the largest telescope in space, and is equipped with high-resolution and high-sensitivity instruments, allowing it to view objects too old, distant, or faint for the Hubble Space Telescope.”
- en.wikipedia.org: “The Webb was launched on 25 December 2021 on an Ariane 5 rocket from Kourou, French Guiana. In January 2022, it arrived at its destination, a solar orbit near the Sun–Earth L2 Lagrange point, about 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 mi) from Earth.”
- en.wikipedia.org: “Webb's primary mirror consists of 18 hexagonal mirror segments made of gold-plated beryllium, which together create a 6.5-meter-diameter (21 ft) mirror, compared with Hubble's 2.4 m (7 ft 10 in). This gives Webb a light-collecting area of about 25 m2 (270 sq ft), about six times that of Hubble.”
- en.wikipedia.org: “It can detect objects up to 100 times fainter than Hubble can, and objects much earlier in the history of the universe, back to redshift z≈20 (about 180 million years cosmic time after the Big Bang).”