The powerful James Webb Space Telescope's inaugural batch of images has opened a new chapter of cosmic exploration, but astronomers say the observatory's most consequential discoveries may well be those they have yet to even imagine.
Distant colliding galaxies, gas-giant exoplanets and dying star systems were the first celestial subjects captured by the multibillion-dollar observatory, putting its wide range of infrared-imaging capabilities on colorful display and proving the telescope works as designed.
"Who knows what's coming for JWST. But I'm sure we're going to have a lot of surprises," René Doyon, principal investigator for one of Webb's instruments, the Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph, said Tuesday at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, where the agency unveiled the observatory's first full-color images.
Taken together, dark energy and dark matter are now estimated by scientists to account for 95% of the known universe. All the galaxies, planets, dust, gases and other visible matter in the cosmos compose just 5%.Amber Straughn, a deputy project scientist working with Webb, said: "It's hard to imagine what we might learn with this hundred-times-more-powerful instrument that we really don't know yet.
At least one of the tiny specks of light "photo-bombing" the edge of the picture dates back 13.1 billion years, or nearly 95% of the way to the Big Bang, the theoretical cosmic flashpoint that put the universe in motion 13.8 billion years ago. "The universe has been out there, we just had to build a telescope to see what was there," she added.
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