NASA’s new Webb space telescope opens its golden ‘eye’

Authored by pbs.org and submitted by thewyldfire
image for NASA’s new Webb space telescope opens its golden ‘eye’

You know, this thing was built for one purpose or originally conceived of for one purpose, which is to see light from the most distant galaxies and stars. And the reason you need this telescope and not something like the Hubble Space Telescope, is that those distant objects are moving away from us so fast that the light is being stretched out. It's in what's called the infrared. And so you can't see it. If you're looking at it's like night goggles, you can't see anything. But if you look through an infrared telescope, oh yes, there I see a star or a galaxy. And so that's why they built this. But the crazy thing is, is that since they conceived of it, people discovered, Oh, there's planets orbiting stars outside our solar system and we could look at those with this telescope. That's crazy. We can do that. They didn't design it for that, but now they can use it for that. The final thing I'll say about what they're going to find is, they don't know. And that's the cool thing. When you give scientists a new piece of equipment and say, check this out, see what you can do with it. They're going to come up with interesting observations, and I was saying the first example of that is Galileo. Like he built the telescope well, he was looking around. He didn't know what he was going to find. He pointed it at Jupiter and suddenly he discovered moons around Jupiter. He didn't build the telescope because he wanted to know if there were moons around Jupiter. Nobody knew. Yeah, but he built it and he found them.

Greenfire32 on January 9th, 2022 at 17:27 UTC »

Peirce Brosnan: * heavy breathing*

tampabayrum on January 9th, 2022 at 16:35 UTC »

This thing has been SO many years in the making, so glad it is finally in space where it belongs, and soon to give us incredible new information!

billbob19 on January 9th, 2022 at 12:59 UTC »

I can't wait to see the pictures this thing will be taking. Truly amazing project...