![]() ![]() The telescope has a varied set of scientific goals, including examining nearby exoplanets, studying the earliest stars, observing supermassive black holes and looking for signs of cold dark matter. While the Hubble Space Telescope looks mostly in the visual and ultraviolet parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, the JWST is looking at longer wavelengths, in the infrared. There are five of these in the Earth-sun system, and the one the JWST will stay at sits 1.5 million kilometres (1 million miles) from Earth, in the opposite direction to the sun, called Lagrangian point 2 or L2.Īlthough the JWST is often described as a replacement for Hubble, its capabilities differ slightly compared to the iconic telescope that came before it. The JWST sits in a Lagrange point between Earth and the sun, a point at which the gravitational pull between two orbiting bodies balances out, meaning something placed at that point can stay there with little effort. The JWST sits at a point further from Earth than Hubble, which orbits at an altitude of around 570km above Earth’s surface. The galaxy dates back to just 300 million years after the big bang, which is 100 million years older than the previous oldest identified galaxy, GN-z11. ![]() Just a few days later, researchers spotted the oldest galaxy ever discovered in JWST data. At the same time, NASA released an analysis of the composition of an exoplanet named WASP-96b and quietly released a picture of Jupiter. On 12 July 2022, NASA released JWST’s first set of full-resolution science images, which included an image of the Carina Nebula, the Eight-Burst Nebula, a group of galaxies called Stephan’s Quintet and a galaxy cluster stretching the light of the objects behind it. On 16 March 2022, it focussed all its mirrors on a single star for the first time. JWST was fully deployed on 8 January 2022 and reached its destination on 24 January. Since the project was first envisioned in 1996, its costs have overrun from $0.5 billion to almost $10 billion. ![]() The ambitious space observatory took off from the European Spaceport launch site near Kourou, in French Guiana, on 25 December 2021 on a European Space Agency (ESA) Ariane 5 rocket, after a series of delays. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is NASA’s successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. ![]()
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