The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was finally launched by NASA on Christmas 2021 after a long series of delays. Astronomers put a lot of faith in the telescope, considering that it’s able to unpuzzle a lot of mysteries of the Cosmos.
With James Webb, astronomers hope to answer some fundamental questions about the very first stars that illuminated the Universe. They also hope to learn a lot more about galaxies and more. Maybe the telescope will even make humanity find out more about the Big Bang, as there are some serious conundrums there as well. What existed before the Big Bang itself? Where did all the energy from the singularity come from? Why did the singularity expand in the first place? How the laws of physics were created? Such questions always needed answers.
But since it cannot be done all at once, we have to be happy that the next-generation James Webb Space Telescope is out there to explore the heavens. And it just reached an apparently insignificant but important milestone.
JWST aims at the HD 84406 star
According to ExtremeTech.com, James Webb just began looking at its first star: the one known as HD 84406. The star is located in the Ursa Major constellation and about 258 light-years away from our planet.
It’s important to know that James Webb didn’t spot the star in a way we all expected. The telescope needs to implement a calibration procedure that takes months, and this is just the beginning of it. The telescope’s instruments registered 18 individual light points. Each point belongs to a mirror segment.
The James Webb Space Telescope was created to be more powerful than Hubble, the much older telescope launched back in April 1990. Meanwhile, technology evolved tremendously in more than three decades since Hubble was deployed, meaning that it was only a matter of time until a new and improved telescope was needed. We can realistically expect that James Webb will revolutionize astronomy!