- NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has opened a window into our universe like never before.
- Thanks to its powerful infrared vision, JWST can peer into the hearts of stellar nurseries.
- JWST reveals how stars, planets and potentially life itself form in our universe. It’s beautiful.
The James Webb Space Telescope is, in many ways, a time machine. It uses infrared vision to go back more than 13.5 billion years to the earliest moments of our universe.
But even today, the cosmos is expanding and evolving, giving rise to new stars, planets and new possibilities for the emergence of life.
Stellar nurseries, where new stars bloom, are thick clouds of gas and dust, also called molecular clouds. JWST can see through clouds to observe star formation in real time, providing a unique chance to understand how new solar systems form and, ultimately, what makes our existence possible.
“We can actually go into the nurseries and look at the babies instead of looking at this ancient, ancient archaeological evidence of our own solar system,” said Klaus Pontoppidan, a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a former JWST project scientist.
JWST’s observations of star nurseries across the galaxy have inspired numerous scientific discoveries. But they are also profoundly beautiful to look at.
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