For the James Webb Telescope, Now the Real Work Begins

tech.hindustantimes.com:

With the help of none other than the president of the United States, the James Webb Space Telescope unveiled its first, full color images this week, overpowering older photos by the Hubble Space Telescope and garnering gasps of wonder from all over the world.

As impressive as those first pictures are, not to mention the telescope’s ability to see almost to the beginning of time, there’s a lot more to the James Webb telescope. On this special episode of Bloomberg’s Giant Leap, we meet five of the many scientists who will be using it to analyze not only the earliest galaxies, but unexplored regions of our own solar system and Earth-like planets orbiting nearby stars that just might support life.

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- One day, perhaps, it will rank among the iconic images of a new space age: a sharp and sublime technicolor mélange, staring back at the human species from 13 billion years in its past. Some two decades and $10 billion in the making, the James Webb Space Telescope has sent back its first snapshots from orbit. It didn’t disappoint.

Its initial image, unveiled at a White House ceremony Monday, focused on a galaxy cluster named SMACS 0723. The cluster’s gravitational field acts as a kind of magnifying glass, helping to illuminate yet more distant galaxies that might otherwise be too dim to see. The result was a canvas of shimmering stars and nascent galaxies and unnerving cosmic depths that included the oldest light ever captured.

“We’re going back almost to the beginning,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. By the beginning, he meant the start of the whole galactic show: the big bang, the explosive expansion of space and time outward from the singularity that is thought to have preceded all existence. It’s by