The James Webb Telescope is made to collect and analyse infrared light, which has longer wavelengths than what the human eye can see. As a result, it will be able to collect infrared radiation from the earliest galaxies.
More than 13 billion light years away, the early galaxies might only appear as dim smudges with the James Webb telescope’s current strength.
However, those shiny dots will aid scientists in learning more about the origins of the universe as we know it.
Caitlin Casey, an astronomer from the University of Texas at Austin, will be one of the astronomers involved in the search for those early galaxies.
One method, according to her, is to point the telescope at the same area of the sky for at least 100 hours and wait for the light from these far-off objects to stream in.
The so-called deep field technique was shown to be able to locate a large number of galaxies that proved difficult to observe by the Hubble space telescope.
Whereas Hubble could see 10,000 galaxies in a deep field, Casey predicts that with the James Webb Telescope, “we’re going to have a million galaxies.”
Beyond discovering new galaxies, Casey wants to comprehend the overall structure of the cosmos, or how it might appear from a bird’s eye perspective.
However, that is only the beginning. Webb has a remarkable range of scientific applications.
Webb will be used, for instance, by Megan Mansfield, a NASA Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Arizona, to examine the atmospheres of planets orbiting stars beyond our solar system.
She is especially interested in learning about their atmospheres. That will provide her with a wealth of information about the planet and its potential for supporting life.
A team led by Anna Nierenberg of the University of California, Merced, has devised a smart technique to use the new telescope in an effort to comprehend the fundamental properties of dark matter—that invisible substance that accounts for about 25% of the cosmos.
And, as with any new scientific instrument, no one knows what secrets the James Webb telescope will reveal about our universe.
