This image shows the same astronomical object, the Ring Nebula, in three different views: from Hubble (at left), from JWST’s NIRCam instrument (center), and from JWST’s MIRI instrument (right). At longer wavelengths, features unseen in visible light spectacularly appear, and JWST is sensitive enough to unveil many of them for the first time. (Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, M. Barlow, N. Cox, R. Wesson; NASA, ESA, and C. Robert O’Dell (Vanderbilt University))
More than two years after JWST began science operations, our Universe now looks very different. Here are its biggest science contributions.
It’s hard to fathom, but it’s barely been two years since the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began its science operations in July of 2022. Back then, we had an incredible amount of information about our Universe that we had already uncovered, as well as a great number of cosmic puzzles we were still facing with no obvious solution in sight. We knew that our Universe was:
13.8 billion years old,
began with a hot Big Bang in the aftermath of an inflationary period,
was dominated by the mysterious dark energy and dark matter, whose nature was unknown,
with the big problem of the “Hubble tension” looming over our measurement of the expansion rate,
where supermassive black holes were spotted to be very massive even early on,
and where even the earliest galaxies detected were massive, somewhat evolved, and bright.
Our picture of the Universe included galactic, stellar, and chemical evolution, from a pristine early state to the late-time state…
