Nearly a month after its launch, the James Webb Space Telescope has reached its final destination, 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, from where it will be able to observe the first galaxies to appear in the Universe. The $10 billion successor to the Hubble Space Telescope is designed to observe the infrared part of the spectrum, which corresponds to thermal radiation. For this reason it must be away from the Earth and any other source of heat.
For this reason he headed to the so-called point Lagrange 2, where he will take advantage of gravitational balances to follow the Earth in its journey around the Sun at a constant and safe distance.
One hundred times more powerful than Hubble
Named after James Webb, NASA Commander in the 1960s, the most expensive space telescope ever built is a collaboration between NASA and the European and Canadian space services. According to its designers, it is about 100 times more powerful than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, which is based on a much smaller 2.4-meter mirror.
Unlike Hubble, which mainly sees in the visible part of the spectrum, Webb is designed to detect radiation mainly in the infrared, which will allow it to look through gas and dust nebulae, opaque to visible light, and detect objects. which remained invisible to this day.
It will also be able to look hundreds of millions of light-years away from Hubble and see the first stars that formed about 100 million years after the Big Bang gave birth to the Universe. It took them 13.7 billion years to reach Earth.
Thanks to its high resolution, the telescope will be able to examine even the atmospheres of distant exoplanets, looking for signs of life.
