James Webb Space Telescope begins hunt for the first stars and habitable worlds

tech.hindustantimes.com:

The first stunning images from the James Webb Space Telescope were revealed this week, but its journey of cosmic discovery has only just begun. Here is a look at two early projects that will take advantage of the orbiting observatory's powerful instruments.

One of the great promises of the telescope is its ability to study the earliest phase of cosmic history, shortly after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.

The more distant objects are from us, the longer it takes for their light to reach us, and so to gaze back into the distant universe is to look back in the deep past.

"We're going to look back into that earliest time to see the first galaxies that formed in the history of the universe," explained Space Telescope Science Institute astronomer Dan Coe, who specializes in the early universe.

Astronomers have so far gone back 97 percent of the way back to the Big Bang, but "we just see these tiny red specks when we look at these galaxies that are so far away."

"With Webb, we'll finally be able to see inside these galaxies and see what they're made of."

While today's galaxies are shaped like spirals or ellipticals, the earliest building blocks were "clumpy and irregular," and Webb should reveal older redder stars in them, more like our Sun, that were invisible to the Hubble Space Telescope.

Coe has two Webb projects coming up -- observing one of the most distant galaxies known, MACS0647-JD, which he found in 2013, and Earendel, the most distant star ever detected, which was found in March of this year.

While the public has been enticed by Webb's stunning pictures, which are shot in infrared because light from the far cosmos has stretched into these wavelengths as the universe expanded, scientists are equally keen on