The James Webb Space Telescope was successfully launched by NASA at 9:20 am (GMT) this Saturday (25) from Kourou base in French Guiana.
The launch took place seven years late and was much celebrated by the US space agency.
“The beginning of an exciting new decade has soared into the sky. The mission will change our understanding of space,” NASA posted on its Twitter account shortly after launch. “The space telescope is now on its way to its final destination, 1.5 million kilometers from Earth,” NASA wrote next.
“The journey of millions of miles begins to unlock the secrets of the Cosmos,” wrote former astronaut Bill Nelson, NASA administrator, also after the launch on Saturday.
According to the agency, James Webb will need approximately two weeks to deploy his antennas and mirrors “to alone in the vastness of space begin to answer our biggest questions.”
Scientists want to use the James Webb, the largest and most powerful ever built, to look back in time more than 13.5 billion years to see the first stars and galaxies formed, 100 million years after the Big Bang.
The NASA project, conceived in partnership with ESA (its European counterpart) and CSA (Canadian), had its formal beginning in 2003, based on proposals that date back to the 1990s, not long after the launch of the Space Telescope Hubble.
It is not by chance that the project has since been presented as “the successor to Hubble”, although it is important to qualify how this succession takes place.
One of the great creators of the project was John Mather, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics, Mather was one of those responsible for the Cobe satellite, which operated from 1989 to 1993 and mapped the small variations in the cosmic background radiation, the microwave echo left by the Big Bang.
It is, in essence, the first light to circulate freely in the Universe, when it was only about 380,000 years old, and it shows the small fluctuations in the distribution of matter and energy that would ultimately produce stars and galaxies.
Hubble, launched in 1990, was used to probe the depths of the Universe, reconstructing the last 13 billion years of cosmic history. The further away the observed object, the older it is (because the time it takes for light to reach us, traveling through a vacuum at 300,000 km/sec, is greater).
With this, the venerable space telescope, still in operation today, managed to see some of the first galaxies of modern configuration to appear in the Universe, some 500 million years after the Big Bang. But when Hubble tries to see further than that (and farther back in time), all it finds is darkness. Not because there’s nothing there, but because the light that comes from farther away is invisible to him.
Webb, in turn, was designed to see what Hubble can’t. It is hoped that he can delve into this journey into the past and see the first primitive galaxies, diving into a period up to 300 million years after the Big Bang, who knows less.
With this, it will reveal whether our current cosmological models really stand still, which indicate how the Universe evolved since the beginning, 13.8 billion years ago, and fill in the gaps between what we have already observed directly in the cosmic background radiation. and in the Hubble observations.
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