IT'S TIME TO GET EXCITED ABOUT THE JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE

NASA’s most ambitious project yet will peer deep into space looking for clues about the birth of planets, stars and the evolution of the Universe itself

- BEN GARROD

You might be tempted to think of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) as just another hyped-up space mission. Resist that temptation. The JWST is the most ambitious space telescope ever launched.

It’s also the biggest gamble.

The JWST – or Webb, as NASA would like it to be known – is designed to reveal the evolution of the Universe, from its early phases to the modern era. It will do this by undertaking a thorough investigation of the Universe at infrared wavelengths.

To reveal the evolution of the Universe, Webb will target the origin of the various celestial objects that have emerged along the way. This begins in the distant, early Universe. Webb’s cameras and instruments will focus on the first galaxies and the first stars to light up the Universe.

Today, the evidence suggests that there’s probably a supermassive black hole at the centre of every galaxy. Yet how those black holes form is a mystery. Were they the gravitational seeds that catalysed galaxy formation, or did they form naturally at the centre of a gigantic gas cloud that was already coalescing to become a galaxy. Webb will investigate.

As for the first stars, no one knows what these were like, but theory suggests that they could be gigantic megastars, burning more brightly and hotter than anything in the Universe today. Webb will search for them.

It will also scrutinise the birth of stars and planets in the more recent Universe by peering inside the dusty nebulae that cocoon these nascent celestial objects.