The Webb telescope: a source of wonder that is both aesthetic and technological | Monica Grady
On Tuesday afternoon, we were treated to some of the most detailed images of the universe that anyone has ever seen. The pictures were the first to be released from the James Webb space telescope (JWST) and were greeted with joy by astronomers and journalists. The former because the images demonstrated that the telescope was working and the latter because the pictures would be much more pleasing to view on a newspaper's front page than the candidates for leadership of the Conservative party.
The first images are, literally, wonderful. Specialist astronomers can see details of the birth and death of stars, as well as all the stages in between; and witness gravitational lensing, predicted by Einstein, previously only partially recorded by the JWST's predecessor, the Hubble space telescope (HST). They continue to rhapsodise about the number and diversity of exoplanets - planets outside the solar system - that the JWST should find, and how instruments on the telescope will be able to detect and analyse exoplanetary atmospheres. The first signature of life on a planet beyond the solar system might be recorded by the JWST.
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