The James Webb Space Telescope will collect light 9x faster than the Hubble Space Telescope

2016-11-05: Construction is complete

The telescope element of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the largest space telescope ever constructed, stands completed in an enormous clean room at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. JWST will now go through a series of rigorous tests, including shaking and noise tests to simulate launch conditions, and cryogenic tests to make sure it can stand up to the frigid conditions of space.

2021-11-07: Still not launched, but here’s why it matters:

The telescope is 14 years behind schedule and 20x over budget. “We’ve worked as hard as we could to catch all of our mistakes and test and rehearse. We’re going to put our zillion-dollar telescope on top of a stack of explosive material” and turn things over to fate. Other researchers want to understand the first stars. Some think Webb will see so-called “Population III stars,” primordial beasts that are hypothesized to have been roughly 10000x heavier than our sun. Such stars would help solve another major mystery of galaxy formation: how galaxies’ centers ended up with supermassive black holes — physically small yet incredibly powerful gravitational sinkholes that can weigh billions of times the mass of our sun. Nobody knows how supermassive black holes grew so heavy, or when, or why their properties are correlated with properties of their host galaxies. One theory is that Population III stars seeded the holes, but there are 1m other theories. Webb will look for signatures of the different scenarios.

2022-07-15: The first images.

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