Technology The years and billions spent on the James Webb telescope? Worth it.

tom_mai78101

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“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” So says Hamlet to his school chum after a chilling encounter with a ghost. The line went through my mind as I looked at the first image released by NASA from the James Webb Space Telescope, the marvel of engineering and audacity recently parked and unfolded in an orbit roughly 1 million miles from home.

Operating so far away gives the Webb supersensitivity to infrared light that cannot be seen by the human eye. It can see much, much farther than the low-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. And because light travels at a constant speed, seeing farther in distance is the same as looking more deeply back in time.

The image is a picture from 4.6 billion years ago. This is only the first of many mind-boggling concepts contained in the spellbinding frame. A pitch-black background is speckled with thousands of distinct lights, some starlike in their brilliance, others smudgy, and still others smaller than pinpoints.

All these distinct lights are contained in a tiny speck of space. How tiny? Scientists proposed this way of envisioning: Take a single grain of sand, hold it out at arm’s length, and compare it with your entire field of vision. That is the speck of space Webb looked at to acquire its first observation.

 
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