The Most Powerful Telescope Ever Built Is Ready to Unlock the Mysteries of the Cosmos

French Guiana does not often get the chance to be the center of the world, to say nothing of the universe—or at least humanity’s understanding of it. But on Dec. 24, at 7:20 AM ET, the small, forested country on the forehead of South America is set to be at the center of things indeed, when a European Space Agency Ariane V rocket is expected to lift off with a payload that represents $9.5 billion worth of hardware and 25 years of work, and on which the next generation of research into the origin of the cosmos depends. The spacecraft entrusted to the Ariane 5 that morning will be the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), NASA’s—and the entire astronomical community’s—follow-on to the aging Hubble Space Telescope, which has widely been considered the greatest space observatory ever built—until now, at least. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The Hubble’s work is most powerfully captured in the vast album of dazzling photos it’s sent back in the 31 years it has been flying. But those pictures also reveal its sole shortcoming: Hubble sees in the ultraviolet and visible spectrums, allowing it to peer approximately 13.4 billion years back in time—or just 400 million years after the Big Bang (because light from the cosmos can take a heck of a long time to reach us, looking up at the night sky is effectively looking into the past). A lot happened in those missing early years—galaxies began to form, stars began...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Space Source Type: news