JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE SHOWS US THE UNIVERSE IN A NEW LIGHT
On my phone is a slightly blurry photo of a distant, unnamed galaxy. It’s a little white smudge with spiral arms like sheep’s wool fluff – one galaxy among thousands of others in the James Webb Space Telescope’s (JWST) new breathtakingly detailed image of the distant cosmos – and I can’t stop staring at it. There is nothing especially remarkable about this little white swirl; it’s not the largest or sharpest or most perfectly rendered or in any way most interesting galaxy in the image. But before JWST, no human had ever really seen it. I am seeing it now, fully and completely, and it is beautiful.
JWST is going to show us a lot of things we’ve
