Behold: The first images snapped by the James Webb Space Telescope
– a collection of four galaxies about 290 million light years away from us merging with one another; and a fifth galaxy, NGC 7320, at the bottom, which is actually closer at 40 million light years from Earth. The swirling mass showcases how galaxies can interact with one another, colliding with each other to spur new star growth.
"How could you not discover stuff if you're a hundred times more powerful than previous telescopes," Jane Rigby, the telescope's project scientist for operations, enthused at the briefing."From the data that I've seen so far, from the work that we've seen … the first week of science is going to be revolutionary. These are incredible capabilities that we've never had before.
The telescope could help cosmologists study the expansion of the universe. Rigby said the probe could measure the light from Cepheid stars, red giants, and galaxies to calculate their accurate distances away from Earth, allowing researchers to estimate Hubble's constant – a hotly contested measure of how fast the universe is expanding.
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