By Enyerly Reyes

Many have heard of the Hubble Space Telescope that sends us so many fantastic images of deep space. In contrast to the Hubble, which orbits the Earth, the James Webb Space Telescope is a special observatory orbiting the sun. This new telescope’s function is to utilize its high resolution and extreme sensitivity to view objects that are too old, distant or faint for the Hubble Space Telescope.

This telescope cost about ten billion dollars, which is a lot of money, but so worth it because of what we can learn. The observatory launched on December 25, 2021 from ESA’s launch site at Kourou in French Guiana.

The telescope utilizes giant gold-coated mirrors to see the universe, launching a heavy mirror into space would have been very difficult, so engineers built the telescope by utilizing 18 smaller mirrors that fit together like a puzzle. When inside the rocket all the mirrors fold up and once in orbit it unfolded to show one larger mirror. The technology to make these many mirrors work together without a loss of resolution was a big part of the hefty price tag.

This telescope remains the most powerful space telescopes to date. Its first pictures were finally shown to the public in July of 2022. The mini-article, “James Webb Space Telescope” published in NASA’s official website says “The James Webb Space Telescope is an infrared observatory orbiting the Sun about 1 million miles from Earth to find the first galaxies that formed in the early universe and to see stars forming planetary systems.”

Scientists are using this device to look so far away that the light hitting it was sent during the earliest known date at the start of the known universe. That is some interesting and mind-blowing science.

On December 8, 2022 NASA’s Webb telescope spotted stars that “stirred up” the Southern Ring Nebula. The stars seemed to craft the oblong, curvy shapes of the Southern Ring Nebula. Thanks to Webb, scientists have even come to believe in a possible third star in the nebula that might have caused the red gas and dust surrounding it. It has discovered numerous exo-planets, and is capable of looking at its atmosphere in absolute detail. It is interesting to know that they are figuring out the various elements of the universe.

It is said that using the James Webb Telescope we will be able to capture and see galaxies that are at an extreme distance from us, after the big bang that scientists estimate took place around 13.8 billion years ago. Meaning we will be able to see light from 13.7 billion years ago. That is old. The telescope can see through dusty regions in order to study light that had been emitted more than 13 billion years ago by the oldest and most ancient stars and galaxies in the universe.

However many students here in PHS are skeptical about whether or not this new telescope is actually capable of seeing 13 billion light years past Earth. “I think it’s very interesting, yet I don’t really believe that it’s capable of seeing light years past Earth, it seems unreal” says Arianny, a senior. The concept of this may take a little getting used to, but it is sound.

One question that needs to be answered is who was James Webb and why is this thing named after him? James Webb was the scientist who oversaw the Apollo program. Those were the missions in the 1960’s and early 1970’s that landed Americans on the moon. It was a great leap of our technology and so is this telescope.

It is still unclear if this expensive and hi-tech telescope will help us discover something totally new, or whether it will just help us ask the next questions. One thing that is certain is that it will help us expand our knowledge of the universe. At the present time we may not be able to travel to the stars in spaceships, but we can look at them with the help of this new tool.