The James Webb Telescope Is Seeing Things That Shouldn’t Exist #Space #JamesWebb #universe#Astronomy

[00:00:00]Because looking far into the universe is looking into the past. Light takes time to travel. Sunlight takes about 8 minutes to reach Earth. So, we see the Sun as it was 8 minutes ago. A star located 100 light-years away is seen as it was 100 years ago. A galaxy billions of light-years away is seen as it was billions of years ago. In other words, telescopes don't just observe distance.

[00:00:25]They observe time.

[00:00:27]The most powerful telescope ever created is the James Webb Space Telescope. It was launched in 2021 and is located about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth.

[00:00:37]Its specialty is observing mainly infrared light. As the universe expands, the light from ancient galaxies gets stretched. It leaves the visible [music] spectrum and shifts into infrared. The James Webb was designed specifically to detect this extremely ancient light.

[00:00:52]That's why it can observe some of the very first galaxies formed after the Big Bang.

[00:00:57]There are also giant telescopes here on Earth. The largest ones are located in extremely high and dry places, like the Atacama Desert in Chile. That's because Earth's atmosphere interferes heavily with observations. It distorts light, creates turbulence, and reduces sharpness. That's why stars appear to twinkle when seen from Earth in space.

[00:01:18]They don't twinkle.

[00:01:20]The most powerful telescopes can detect light that traveled for more than 13 billion years. But, there is a limit called the observable universe. It is the maximum distance light has been able to travel since the birth of the universe. Today, we estimate that this region is about 93 billion light-years in diameter. And that is only the part we can see. The real universe [music] may be much larger, perhaps even infinite. At this exact moment, ancient photons are crossing deep space toward Earth.

[00:01:49]Some began their journey before the Sun even existed. [music] And maybe, right now, a telescope is capturing light from something we have never seen before, because every time we look farther into the universe, we are looking deeper into the past.