Webb's instruments also make it ideal to search for signs of potentially life-supporting atmospheres around scores of newly documented planets orbiting distant stars and to observe worlds much closer to home, such as Mars and Saturn's icy moon Titan.Īt 6.4 metres, Webb’s gold-plated, flower-shaped mirror is the biggest and most sensitive ever sent into space. Water discovered on ‘habitable zone’ exoplanet could actually be methane, new study finds.Taken together, these features are expected to transform astronomy, providing the first glimpse of infant galaxies dating to just 100 million years after the Big Bang, the theoretical flashpoint that set the expansion of the known universe in motion an estimated 13.8 billion years ago. Its infrared sensitivity allows it to detect light sources that would otherwise be hidden in the visible spectrum by dust and gas.
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The larger light-collecting surface of Webb's primary mirror - an array of 18 hexagonal segments of gold-coated beryllium metal - enables it to observe objects at greater distances, thus further back in time, than Hubble or any other telescope. “Webb 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,” Jonathan Gardner, Webb’s deputy project scientist said during a June media briefing.
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A gas planet, it’s not a candidate for life elsewhere but a key target for astronomers. It’s about the size of Saturn and is 1,150 light-years away. It includes a black hole that scientists said showed material “swallowed by this sort of cosmic monster”. Stephan's Quinet, five galaxies in a cosmic dance that was first seen 225 years ago in the constellation Pegasus. One view was a stunning landscape of orange cliffs. Carina nebula, one of the bright stellar nurseries in the sky, about 7,600 light-years away. Southern Ring nebula, which is sometimes called “eight-burst": Images show a dying star with a foamy edge of escaping gas.