US space agency NASA took 30 years to build the telescope, which it dubs the world's most advanced space observatory, at a cost of US $10 billion. The telescope, named after NASA's second administrator James E Webb, is based on infrared light and can see events from 13.5 billion years back in time. This is right after the Big Bang when a single, unimaginably hot and dense point called the singularity exploded to form the Universe. NASA states the aim of the telescope is to examine the formation of galaxies and the evolution of our own solar system.
AVI LOEB, Frank B Baird Jr Professor of Science at Harvard University and the former chair of the institution's Department of Astronomy, was associated with JWST in its formative stages in the 1990s, when it was called the Next Generation Space Telescope. Its observations of the earliest galaxies could be instrumental in understanding life today, he says in a conversation with
AKSHIT SANGOMLA.
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The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the most advanced observatory made so far. What makes it different from the Hubble telescope, and other previous telescopes?
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