A new era of understanding space — The James Webb Telescope
On 24 December 2021, the James Webb telescope, developed by NASA — National Aeronautics and Space Administration with contributions from the European Space Agency — ESA and Canadian Space Agency | Agence spatiale canadienne, was launched to the Lagrange 2 point, which is 1.5M km away from Earth.
But first, let us understand what are space telescopes and why the James Webb telescope is important.
Galileo, way back in 1609, first observed the craters and mountains on the moon. Since then, astronomers have worked on developing stronger and more complex telescopes to observe space. However, any light that passes through the Earth’s atmosphere gets distorted (a phenomenon that also causes stars to twinkle).
This has led astronomers to envision having a telescope in space, which would allow them to better view the elements in space without the distortion caused by the Earth’s atmosphere.
In the 1970s, the ESA and NASA designed the Hubble telescope, which was later deployed roughly 600 kms above the Earth’s surface in 1990. Since then, the Hubble telescope has mapped the solar system and the universe, allowing scientists to discover new galaxies and better understand the solar system. Images from the Hubble have helped scientists study the birth and death of stars, as well as discover new moons around Pluto which we did not know existed.
Coming back to the James Webb telescope now.
With its significantly larger field of view, higher spatial resolution, and its position of approximately 1.5M km from the Earth, we will now be able to get much more information about space. It will be able to study the infrared spectrum and send back information of stars almost 13.7B light years away, allowing us to to look further in our attempt to study planets and understand their habitability.
Quite literally, the James Webb telescope could allow us to travel through time as it looks to capture light streaming from the first stars and galaxies that were formed almost 13.7B years ago.
