Since mid-2022, JWST has been showing us how the Universe grows up, from planets to galaxies and more. So, what’s its biggest find of all?
It’s now been more than a full three years since the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) — humanity’s newest flagship space observatory — was launched into space. Just as the Hubble Space Telescope revolutionized our view of the Universe with its unprecedented capabilities, which it primarily did by showing us what the Universe looked like, JWST is uncovering never-before-seen features and properties of objects throughout the Universe: features and properties that no other observatory, not even Hubble, has ever been capable of. After a little more than six months of pre-science operations, including deployment, alignment, commissioning, and calibration, science operations began in July of 2022.
In the 2.5 years that have passed since, we’ve learned an enormous set of new lessons: about exoplanets and their atmospheres, stars, galaxies, star-and-planet formation, cataclysmic events, and much more. And yet, even the people who work professionally (and prolifically) with JWST data can’t keep up with it all. At the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, I was asked a deceptively…
