The universe’s first stars ignited 13 billion years ago. The famous James Webb Space Telescope is so big and powerful that we can dizzyingly see the birth of these stars – or at least the light that the stars sent out around that time.
The telescope, which is a successor to the famous Hubble telescope from 1990, has a mirror with a diameter of 6.5 meters (Hubble’s is only 2.4 meters). This allows the telescope to interrogate these distant stars and galaxies.
The image below is of the famous Carina Nebula. To the human eye, it represents only a spot in the sky about the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length. But the Carina Nebula stretches at least 150 light years from edge to edge.
A light year is approximately 9.46 trillion kilometers.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was developed by NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency.