And many other secrets of the universe:
NASA launched the James Webb Space Telescope on Saturday, after years of delays and budget hikes.
Webb is 100 times more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope and expected to revolutionize astronomy.
The telescope must first unfold itself in space, travel 1 million miles, and calibrate its instruments.
Morgan McFall-Johnsen, “NASA launches its long-awaited $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope, kicking off a cosmic revolution” at MSN (December 25, 2021)
The collaborative project is looking for primordial galaxies, those that existed less than 400 million years after the Big Bang, and will also conduct many other projects.
They now have new technology for studying them:
It became obvious that another, even grander, space observatory will be needed to get to those early stars and galaxies — those that had lit up the universe after hundreds of millions of years of darkness that followed the Big Bang when the expanding space was only filled with hydrogen atoms…
This missing piece of technology was infrared detectors that would be able to collect the faint light coming from those early stars and galaxies more than 13 billion light-years away.
Tereza Pultarova, “James Webb Space Telescope: The scientific mysteries no other observatory could unravel” at Space.com (December 24, 2021)
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It is bound to shed light on many current mysteries and controversies — and to create new ones instead.