The James Webb Space Telescope only been fully operational for a month, but in that time, it's allowed astronomers to peer father into the universe th

In a single month, the James Webb Space Telescope has seen the oldest galaxies, messy cosmic collisions, and a hot gas planet's atmosphere

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2022-08-14 05:30:02

The James Webb Space Telescope only been fully operational for a month, but in that time, it's allowed astronomers to peer father into the universe than ever before and changed how we see the cosmos.

Often described as the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, Webb launched on December 25, 2021, after more than two decades of development. Since that time, the $10 billion telescope has traveled more than 1 million miles from Earth and is now stationed in a gravitationally stable orbit, collecting infrared light. By gathering infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye, Webb is able to cut through cosmic dust and see far into the past, to the first 400 million years after the Big Bang.

Since the telescope released its first batch of images in July, it's been flooding researchers with observations of distant cosmic objects. For astronomers, these pictures are just the beginning.

The first peek at what Webb could capture was a "deep field" image — a long-exposure observation of a region of the sky, which allows the telescope to capture the light of extremely faint, distant objects.