The James Webb Space Telescope launched on Christmas Day 2021 and quickly became the most powerful telescope ever built. It sits about a million miles from Earth, much further than the Hubble Space Telescope, and it sees the universe in infrared light - the heat-glow that everything in space gives off.
That’s important because the universe is expanding. Light from the most distant galaxies gets stretched out as it travels toward us, eventually shifting from visible light into infrared. Optical telescopes like Hubble can’t see those galaxies. Webb can.
Within months of starting work, Webb captured images of galaxies that existed only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang - earlier and more numerous than astronomers expected. It’s also imaged exoplanet atmospheres, photographed new stars being born, and shown the swirling dust around supermassive black holes in stunning detail. Every image it sends back is a new window into a part of the universe we’d never seen before.
