JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE NEW VIEW OF THE UNIVERSE
Good things come to those who wait. Finally, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) should launch on 18 December 2021. Richard Ellis, of University College London, was on the original committee that pressed for the mission back in 1996. Back then, Hubble had been in space for six years, and was busy revolutionising the way we looked at the universe and our place within it. Yet there are some questions that even Hubble can’t answer. “There’s a horizon beyond which Hubble cannot see,” says Ellis.
The space telescope was named after Edwin Hubble, who showed that the universe is expanding in the 1920s. As space swells, any light travelling through it also gets stretched. The light waves from the very early universe have been elongated to such a degree that they are now beyond the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum. To see them you need an infrared telescope. But you can’t build one on the ground because the heat of the Earth pumps out huge amounts of infrared radiation. You can’t even put it 400 kilometres (248 miles) above the planet like Hubble. Instead Webb will observe
