If you ask an astronomer, “Are time machines real?” you might be surprised to hear the response: “Of course!” Now, I’m sadly not talking about a big blue phone box (Dr youknow-who) or speedy DeLorean (back to you-knowwhen). Instead, I’m talking about telescopes. And the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the most amazing time machine we’ve built yet.
Orbiting around the Sun at a distance of about 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, JWST is seeking to answer some of the biggest questions in science. What were the first stars? How do galaxies evolve? How do stars evolve and could there even be life out on distant exoplanets?
To do this, JWST uses the power of science to look back over billions of years of universal history.
In this wonderful universe of ours, we have several laws of physics that govern throughout. One of these, and my personal favourite, is the speed of light. A universe can have a speed limit, and in our case it’s how fast light can travel in a vacuum. Light, no
