Maggie Aderin-Pocock, who has worked on the JWST, catalogues the science behind its most stunning images in her new book, Webb's Universe. Here's her pick of the telescope’s best shots
has transformed our understanding of the universe. It has peered at planets, stars, galaxies and black holes, casting its eye over a cornucopia of celestial treats. It can seem like JWST arrived out of nowhere, but the telescope has been the collective effort of tens of thousands of scientists over decades. One of those scientists, Maggie Aderin-Pocock, is modest about her individual contribution, instead preferring to talk about the telescope’s fruits.
One of Aderin-Pocock’s favourite phrases to describe what she, and JWST, does is “I trip the light fantastic”, a phrase derived from poet John Milton’s description of a light and nimble dance to music. Although JWST’s manoeuvres in space can be thought of as a careful and coordinated dance, Aderin-Pocock also likes the phrase for how it intimates at the spectrum of light we can now view the universe in.
In the 1990s, astronomer Robert Williams pointed Hubble at an apparently empty patch of sky and left it to gather light for several days. The resulting image was bursting with galaxies, many of them the youngest and furthest away that we knew of. “From that, they were able to infer that, within the whole of the universe, there are about 200 billion galaxies, which slightly makes my head hurt,” says Aderin-Pocock.
is the result of a collision between two smaller galaxies, but it might also help us understand the fate of the Milky Way in billions of years’ time, when it will collide with the nearby Andromeda galaxy.One of the greatest puzzles in modern cosmology is the Hubble tension, which is a clash of values when astronomers try to measure how fast the universe is expanding using different techniques.
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