JAMES WEBB TELESCOPE - SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
News: James
Webb Telescope offers glimpse of the early Universe
What's in the news?
● The
James Webb Space Telescope has spotted two leading contenders for what could be
the most distant galaxy ever seen.
● If
initial estimates are correct, light from these objects has traveled such great
distances that they appear as they did just 350-450 million years after the Big
Bang.
● Along
with more of the telescope's findings, these observations indicate that
galaxies formed and evolved earlier in the Universe's history than astronomers
had been able to probe until now.
James Webb Telescope:
● It
is the world’s biggest and most powerful
space telescope rocketed away last December from French Guiana in South
America.
● It
is a joint venture between the US
(NASA), European (ESA) and Canadian space agencies (CSA).
● It
is an orbiting infrared observatory
that will complement and extend the discoveries of the Hubble Space Telescope,
with longer wavelength coverage and greatly improved sensitivity.
● It
reached its lookout point 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth
in January.
● Webb
was formerly known as the “Next
Generation Space Telescope” (NGST) and it was renamed in 2002 after a
former NASA administrator, James Webb.
● It
will be a large infrared telescope with an approximately 6.5meter primary
mirror.
Objectives and functions of the telescope:
● It
will look deeper into the cosmos and thus further back in time than is possible
with Hubble.
● It
will do this with a much bigger mirror (6.5m in diameter versus 2.4m) and
instruments that are tuned to the infrared.
● Scientists
hope this set-up can detect the light from the very first population of stars
in the Universe to switch on more than 13.5 billion years ago.