Webb and the Big Bang

Hubble’s successor will look back to the birth of galaxies

A telescope is almost like a time machine, allowing us to peer back into the distant past. With the aid of Hubble, NASA has shown us galaxies as they were many billions of years ago. Hubble’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, has the ability to look even deeper into the past. NASA hopes it will see all the way back to when the first galaxies formed, nearly 13.6 billion years ago. And unlike Hubble, which sees mainly in the visible waveband, Webb is an infrared telescope – a big advantage when looking at very distant galaxies. The expansion of the universe means that waves emitted from them are stretched out, so light that was emitted at visible wavelengths actually reaches us in the infrared.