James Webb Telescope
It feels like we are living in an era where science and technology is taking massive leaps changing our world and universe or at least its understanding of it completely the Hubble space telescope showed us the universe in a new light but what we are now experiencing is a revolution a revolution like no other the James Webb space telescope has only begun its science operations and it is already breaking the very model of our universe.
First Telescope
The telescope was invented about 400 years ago in 1608. We think Galileo is the first person who used the telescope towards the sky. The primary lens of his telescope was the size of a cut cucumber piece. But with such a small telescope he saw such things which you cannot see with your eyes.
For Example, the moons of Jupiter, the big ones which are called Galilean satellites because of Galileo.
Hubble Space Telescope
In a sense, the discovery of the telescope started changing the concept, where is man located in the universe, like, the earth is moving around the sun and not that the sun is moving around the earth. Now the telescopes kept improving in the last 400 years and in 1990 “Hubble Space Telescope” was launched. In the beginning, there were some problems with its lens but once it was corrected, it revolutionized astronomy (in a way). It is a fantastic image. The image is “Hubble Deep Field.”
Hubble telescope took the picture of a small part of the sky (One-hundredth size of the full moon) meaning a small part of the sky. Astronomers had thought, seeing through earth telescopes that nothing is present there, Hubble space telescope took its exposure for 140 hours (about 6 days) meaning it kept the shutter of its camera open for 140 hours (about 6 days) and the result is this image. Whatever things you see in this picture, these small smudges are all galaxies and these are old galaxies because they are far from us. In fact, some galaxies were formed when our universe was only 1 billion years old and if I give you a reference our universe today is 13.8 billion years old. So, the galaxies you are seeing are young galaxies. The question now arises when did these galaxies started forming because it was a very surprising thing that these galaxies in the Hubble Deep Field, only after 1bn years of the beginning of the universe are looking very much formed or fully made.
Then how do we find out, are these the first galaxies or can we see even before that?
James Webb Space Telescope.
The planning of the James Webb Telescope had started even before the launch of the Hubble because these sorts of things take time. Hubble was launched in1990 and in 1989 already, plans were afoot, how to make its next generation telescope and work started on it in 1996. But the main thing is, they wanted if they are making a new generation telescope it should be much better than the Hubble telescope. If we make a little comparison, the astronomers talk about the telescope's size according to the size of its mirror. As I just talked about Galileo’s small telescope its lens was the size of a cucumber slice. The mirror of the Hubble Space Telescope is about 2.4 meters a little less than 8 feet. This is a big telescope in space. The mirror, the central mirror of this James Webb space telescope is 6.5 meters that is a little more than 20 feet, and when we talk about mirror size in astronomy, the larger the mirror the lighter you can gather. And you know the whole game in astronomy is about light. The James Webb Space Telescope can gather five and a half times more than the Hubble Space Telescope. As such we can already say that the James Webb Space Telescope will be more powerful. Not only this, the Hubble space telescope worked to a large extent in optical light, on the wavelengths to which our eyes are sensitive, it had a little ultraviolet and a little infrared also. But James Webb Space Telescope is a little different because all its focus is infrared meaning it has no sensitivity in visible light but all in infrared.
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