May the James Webb be glorious
The James Webb Space telescope flies into space today
Today, the James Webb Space Telescope flies into the sky abroad a massive Ariane 5 rocket.
If successful, it will become the flagship space telescope — following in the footsteps of the ever-glorious Hubble.
Costing 10 Billion $ and taking 25 years from conception to launch, it is also one of the largest space missions ever undertaken in human history.
Unlike the Hubble, which orbits the earth, the James Webb will be deployed at the second Lagrange Point (L2) of the Earth-Sun system, at a distance of 1.5 million kilometers from us.
This is an infrared telescope, meaning that it will only collect light falling on it in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
The light from all the objects in the Universe is red-shifted when they reach us — due to a phenomenon commonly described as the ‘expansion of the Universe’.
This redshift is proportional to the distance of the object from us.
The galaxies, stars, and other objects formed in the very early days of the Universe are so redshifted that their light is completely in the infrared.
