OPINION: The James Webb Space Telescope is a remarkable technical tour de force. Like the great observatories before it, the Webb will not disappoint. It will provide great insights for many years to come.
On Monday we got a glimpse of the future in a picture of the most distant past. One of the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope is humanity’s longest and most sensitive exposure of the sky. It reveals light from stars at the dawn of the creation of galaxies more than 13 billion years ago — a time before ordinary galaxies like the Milky Way existed, when the universe was poised to undergo a flurry of chaotic activity assembling galaxies we know today.
It was the telescope that made these discoveries possible. Ever since Galileo, astronomers have been making more powerful telescopes revealing more and more detail about the cosmos to make cosmology a science with testable predictions. A close look at the image shows small, distorted objects that look like they are being viewed through a fishbowl or crystal ball. These gravitationally lensed galaxies have their light concentrated so that we can see them even farther away than the way they would appear without the lens effect. It is also a striking confirmation of the predictions of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, predictions of gravitational lensing that can be confirmed by anyone who views such an image.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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