The telescope is an international collaboration led by NASA in partnership with the European and Canadian space agencies. Webb's instruments also make it ideal to search for evidence of potentially life-supporting atmospheres around scores of newly documented exoplanets - celestial bodies orbiting distant stars - and to observe worlds much closer to home, such as Mars and Saturn's icy moon Titan. While Hubble caught glimmers of "toddler" galaxies, Webb will reveal those objects in greater detail while also capturing even fainter, earlier "infant" galaxies, astrophysicist Eric Smith, NASA's Webb program scientist, told Reuters hours before the launch.Īside from examining the formation of the earliest stars and galaxies, astronomers are eager to study super-massive black holes believed to occupy the centers of distant galaxies. Hubble's view reached back to roughly 400 million years following the Big Bang, a period just after the very first galaxies - sprawling clusters of stars, gases and other interstellar matter - are believed to have taken shape. That, astronomers say, will bring into view a glimpse of the cosmos never previously seen - dating to just 100 million years after the Big Bang, the theoretical flashpoint that set in motion the expansion of the observable universe an estimated 13.8 billion years ago. The new telescope's primary mirror - consisting of 18 hexagonal segments of gold-coated beryllium metal - also has a much bigger light-collecting area, enabling it to observe objects at greater distances, thus farther back into time, than Hubble or any other telescope. Webb mainly will view the cosmos in the infrared spectrum, allowing it to peer through clouds of gas and dust where stars are being born, while Hubble has operated primarily at optical and ultraviolet wavelengths.
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