With the brand-new discovery of Trappist-1, it looks like that our curiosity can’t be satisfied – fortunately, one new telescope might give us a lot to chew on. With NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope close to its retirement after 25 marvelous years spent discovering the celestial heavens, we must look to the new champ on the rise in 2018: the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
The JWST is nearly twice as large as the Hubble and is furnished with a 22-meter (72-foot) sunshield and a mirror with a diameter of 6.5 meters (21.3 feet). These gears work together to let the JWST gather seven times more light than the Hubble.
This level of competency will permit the JWST to spot signatures so weak that even a bumblebee on the moon wouldn’t be able to escape the telescope’s eye. With its great magnification and resolution, the JWST will concentrate on illuminating the galaxies that inhabit our – detecting with its cutting-edge infrared sensors the first planets, stars, and solar systems that flourished after the big bang and now make up our night sky.
In the video below, deputy project researcher and NASA astrophysicist Amber Straughn presents viewers “ANew Era in Astronomy” during the inauguration of the JWST at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario.