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James Webb Telescope

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15 views3 pages

James Webb Telescope

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Sarah Fuster
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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JAMES WEBB TELESCOPE

What is James Webb telescope?

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, the agency's successor to the famous Hubble telescope,
launched on Dec. 25, 2021 on a mission to study the earliest stars and peer back farther into the
universe's past than ever before. It is much more advanced than the Hubble Space Telescope because
of its breakthrough technology, design and its planned location in space.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a space telescope which conducts infrared astronomy. As
the largest optical telescope in space, its high resolution and sensitivity allow it to view objects too
old, distant, or faint for the Hubble Space Telescope.[8] This will enable investigations across many
fields of astronomy and cosmology, such as observation of the first stars, the formation of the first
galaxies, and detailed atmospheric characterization of potentially habitable exoplanets.[9][10]

The James Webb Space Telescope has four key goals:

✦ to search for light from the first stars and galaxies that formed in the universe

after the Big Bang

✦ to study galaxy formation and evolution

✦ to understand star formation and planet formation

✦ to study planetary systems and the origin

JAMES WEBB TELESCOPE DISCOVERIES AND FINDINGS:


NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has captured the first clear evidence of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere of an exoplanet, a planet outside our solar system.

The exoplanet, WASP-39b, is a hot gas giant orbiting a sunlike star that is 700 light-years from Earth
and part of a larger Webb investigation that includes two other transiting planets, according to NASA.
Understanding the atmospheric makeup of planets like WASP-39b is critical for knowing their origins
and how they evolved.

The highly sensitive Webb telescope launched on Christmas Day 2021 toward its current orbit 1.5
million kilometers (nearly 932,000 miles) from Earth. By observing the universe with longer
wavelengths of light than other space telescopes use, Webb can study the beginning of time more
closely, hunt for unobserved formations among the first galaxies, and peer inside dust clouds where
stars and planetary systems are currently forming.
In the captured spectrum of the planet's atmosphere, the researchers saw a small hill between 4.1
and 4.6 microns -- a "clear signal of carbon dioxide," said team leader Natalie Batalha, a professor of
astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California at Santa Cruz, in the release. (A micron is a
unit of length equal to one millionth of a meter.)

James Webb telescope finds two of the oldest and most distant galaxies ever seen. This newly
discovered throng of stars would beat the most distant galaxy identified by the Hubble space
telescope – a record-holder that formed 400m years after the universe began.

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