The Webb telescope has unique capabilities enabled by the way it views the universe, its size, and the new technologies aboard. ![]() And it can be used to study places like Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune while there are no active missions at those planets. It is powerful enough to identify and characterize icy comets in the far reaches of our solar system. It will be able to complement studies of Mars being carried out by orbiters, landers, and rovers by searching for molecules that may be signs of past or present life. In our own solar system, the Webb telescope will study planets and other objects to help us learn more about our solar neighborhood. The Webb telescope will help scientists do just that. There are many waiting to be discovered and there is more to learn about the exoplanets themselves, such as what makes up their atmospheres and what their weather and seasons may be like. Since then, scientists have found thousands more exoplanets and estimate that there are hundreds of billions in the Milky Way galaxy alone. The first planet outside our solar system, or exoplanet, was discovered in 1992. Credit: NASA | › View and download the posters | + Expand image That is vital to understanding the formation of objects such as the first galaxies.īy using the Webb telescope to compare the earliest galaxies with those of today, scientists hope to understand how they form, what gives them their shape, how chemical elements are distributed across galaxies, how central black holes influence their galaxies, and what happens when galaxies collide.Īs we make more discoveries about exoplanets, artists at NASA are imagining what future explorers might encounter on these faraway worlds as part of the Exoplanet Travel Bureau poster series. (For comparison, our Sun has a lifespan of about 10 billion years and will not go supernova.) Observing these luminous supernovae is one of the few ways scientists could study the earliest stars. There were still no stars in the universe at this time, so the next several hundred million years are known as the cosmic dark ages.Ĭurrent theory predicts that the earliest stars were big – 30 to 300 times the size of our Sun – and burned quickly, ending in supernova explosions after just a few million years. The fluxuations give clues about the origin of galaxies and the large-scale structure of galaxies. It is essentially a map of temperature fluctuations across the universe left behind from the Big Bang. The very first form of light we can look back and see comes from this time and is known as the cosmic microwave background radiation. Light that previously couldn’t travel without being scattered by the dense ionized plasma of early particles could now travel freely. Credit: NASA | › Full image and caption | + Expand image The image was captured by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, or WMAP, which spent nine years, from 2001 to 2010, collecting data on the early universe. ![]() ![]() This image shows the temperature fluctuations (shown as color differences) in the cosmic microwave background from a time when the universe was less than 400,000 years old. This process, known as recombination, occurred about 240,000 to 300,000 years after the Big Bang. ![]() As the universe cooled, protons and neutrons combined into ionized hydrogen and helium, which had a positive charge, and eventually attracted all those negatively charged electrons. For the first few hundred-thousand years, the universe was a hot, dense flood of protons, electrons, and neutrons, the tiny particles that make up atoms. The universe, time, and space all began about 13.8 billion years ago with the Big Bang. To better understand what the Webb telescope will study, it’s helpful to know what happened in the early universe, before the first stars formed. What the first galaxies looked like and when they formed is not known, and the Webb telescope is designed to help scientists learn more about that early period of the universe. A look at the James Webb Space Telescope, its mission and the incredible technological challenge this mission presents.
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