The Machine That Sees the Beginning of Time
September 5, 2026 · by White Nights
On Christmas Day, 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope launched from French Guiana and began its journey to a point a million and a half kilometres from Earth — a gravitational equilibrium called L2 where it would remain stationary relative to the Earth and sun, shielded from heat by a five-layer sunshield the size of a tennis court.
It took six months to reach position and fully deploy. The deployment sequence was the most complex ever attempted by an uncrewed spacecraft — 344 single-point failures, any one of which would have ended the mission. Everything worked.
When the first images came back in July 2022, they showed something that hadn't been possible to see before. Webb observes in infrared, which allows it to look through dust clouds that block visible light and to detect the light of objects so far away that the expansion of the universe has stretched it from visible wavelengths into infrared. The first deep field image showed thousands of galaxies in a patch of sky that would fit behind a grain of sand held at arm's length. Some of those galaxies are being seen as they existed less than 300 million years after the Big Bang.
The universe is about 13.8 billion years old. Webb is showing us its infancy.
It has also detected water vapour and carbon dioxide in the atmospheres of exoplanets, imaged stellar nurseries in unprecedented detail, and found evidence of complex organic molecules in interstellar space. Its planned operational life is 20 years. It has been running for three, and it keeps finding things that weren't expected.