How The Golden Eye Of The James Webb Space Telescope Will See The Edge Of The Universe

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is a time machine to the early universe, which uses massive golden mirrors to capture ancient light. The results will likely rewrite and expand our textbooks for years to come.

An international project like this that has countless “firsts” takes time, but the painstaking effort to design, construct and test Webb’s optical system will be worth the wait. Overnight, the eye of the telescope will revolutionize our understanding of the cosmos and be set loose on the biggest questions in astronomy.

The astronomical community was after something that hadn’t been observed before… the early universe. The first stars and galaxies started to form 100 to 250 million years after the Big Bang, around 13.6 billion years ago. Because the universe is expanding, actually the light from the early universe gets stretched into the infrared and that’s called a cosmological redshift. It’s this cosmological redshift that Webb’s optics will be hunting for, to uncover the story of the early universe. Infrared light can pass through dust in the universe. And so it allows us to peer through dust clouds and see, for example, stellar nurseries.

No other telescope today has the collecting power and sensitivity that NASA’s JWST has to lift the veil on the universe’s secrets. The James Webb Space telescope is sensitive enough that if there were a bumblebee at the distance of the moon, we would be able to detect it. The telescope’s core superpowers come from its advanced optical system.

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