Astronomers Haven’t Been This Giddy in Years
About six months have elapsed since the most powerful space telescope in history bid farewell to Earth and took off into the darkness. In that time, the James Webb Space Telescope has deployed its gold-coated mirrors, turned on its instruments, and gotten the hang of operating 1 million miles from Earth. It has taken a good look around, and it’s almost ready to show us what it has found: NASA is scheduled to publicly release Webb’s first batch of full-color images and observations early next week.
Astronomers around the world are—how the list of cosmic objects that will be revealed on Tuesday. Scientists know that Webb is about to become the big thing in astronomy. The observatory, a joint project of NASA and the European and Canadian space agencies, is 100 times more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope. It can study celestial objects in ways that Hubble cannot, and gaze deeper into the cosmos, too—to some of the oldest stars and galaxies, which ignited into existence not long after the Big Bang. It is not hyperbole to say that Webb’s observations will provide an entirely new sense of the universe and how it all came to be.
