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James Webb Space Telescope's 1st year in space has blown astronomers away
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James Webb Space Telescope's 1st year in space has blown astronomers away

After just one year in space, the James Webb Space Telescope is blowing astronomers away with its keen eye on the universe.

Science & Tech

Launched on Dec. 25, 2021, the $10 billion infrared observatory was designed to learn how galaxies form and grow, to peer far back into the universe to the era of the first galaxies, to watch stars be born inside their nebulous embryos in unprecedented detail, and to probe the atmospheres of exoplanets and characterize some of the closest rocky worlds.

However, the complexity of the James Webb Space Telescope (Webb or JWST), including its fold-out, segmented 21-foot (6.5 meters) mirror and its delicate sun-shield the size of a tennis court, meant that astronomers were on tenterhooks as to whether the JWST would perform as hoped.

It turns out, they needn't have worried. "I guess we really weren't expecting the results to be this good," Brenda Frye, an astronomy at Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona, told Space.com.