James Webb Space Telescope Rewrites What We Thought We Knew About the Universe

What is JWST and how is it different from the Hubble Space Telescope?

The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on December 25, 2021 raises a number of serious questions about the Standard Model of cosmology that will likely lead to a revision of the Standard Model, if not a major or even complete rewrite. the same thing. For the uninitiated, the James Webb Telescope is the largest and most powerful space telescope ever built, costing more than $10 billion and taking nearly 20 years to build. JWST’s primary mirror has a diameter of 6.5 meters (21.3 feet), significantly larger than Hubble’s 2.4 meters (7.9 feet) in diameter, giving it 6 times the aperture ratio. Although Hubble can capture some infrared light, it was primarily designed to capture visible and ultraviolet light.

JWST’s emphasis on collecting infrared light is important because it allows it to see through clouds of cosmic dust and allow it to peer much further into the past. As the Universe expanded, the light of early stars and galaxies “shifted” from visible light to ultraviolet and finally to infrared light by the time it reached our location in the Universe. While Hubble was able to use gravitational lensing to peer back 13.4 billion years, JWST can more clearly resolve images of these galaxies and see beyond Hubble’s “baby galaxies” (as NASA describes them) to the first galaxies. which formed to see what “baby galaxies” should be like. So far, the oldest galaxy that JWST has been able to observe appeared just 320 million years after the Big Bang.