James Webb Space Telescope

What if you could travel back in time to learn about the era when galaxies were first starting to form? That’s what the James Webb Space Telescope—a collaborative project between NASA and the European and Canadian space agencies— will be able to do when it’s finished. Because of the way light travels, when we look at stars from our vantage point, we see them as they used to be, not as they really are now. From earth, we see the sun as it was eight minutes ago and the next closest star system, Alpha Centauri, as it was over four years ago. Astronomers believe that peering through a telescope to see light from the first stars and galaxies would effectively mean looking back 13.6 billion years into the past. But there’s a catch. By the time this light reaches us, it has shifted into red wavelengths that are invisible to the human eye. That’s why the Webb telescope, which will travel further outside earth’s orbit than any telescope ever has before, is designed to see the universe at infrar