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- Recently, National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) released a set of images and science products of five different regions of the sky, taken with the James Webb Space Telescope.
- It includes a galaxy cluster which appeared 4.6 billion years ago.
- It is the deepest and finest infrared image of some of the most distant and oldest galaxies ever discovered.
- These characteristics will aid scientists in learning more about each of these ancient galaxies’ mass, age, history, and composition.
James Webb Space Telescope
- The telescope is the result of an international collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency which was launched in December 2021.
- It is currently at a point in space known as the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point, approximately 1.5 million km beyond Earth’s orbit around the Sun.
- The Lagrange Point 2 is one of the five points in the orbital plane of the Earth-Sun system.
- Named after Italian-French mathematician Josephy-Louis Lagrange, the points are in any revolving two-body system like Earth and Sun, marking where the gravitational forces of the two large bodies cancel each other out.
- Objects placed at these positions are relatively stable and require minimal external energy or fuel to keep themselves there, and so many instruments are positioned here.
- It’s the largest, most powerful infrared space telescope ever built.
- It’s the successor to Hubble Telescope.
- It can see backwards in time to just after the Big Bang by looking for galaxies that are so far away that the light has taken many billions of years to get from those galaxies to our telescopes
Objectives:
It will examine every phase of cosmic history: from the Big Bang to the formation of galaxies, stars, and planets to the evolution of our own Solar System.
The goals for the Webb can be grouped into four themes.
- The first is to look back around 13.5 billion years to see the first stars and galaxies forming out of the darkness of the early universe.
- Second, to compare the faintest, earliest galaxies to today’s grand spirals and understand how galaxies assemble over billions of years.
- Third, to see where stars and planetary systems are being born.
- Fourth, to observe the atmospheres of extrasolar planets (beyond our solar system), and perhaps find the building blocks of life elsewhere in the universe.
SOURCE: THE HINDU,THE ECONOMIC TIMES,MINT
