Peter Cullen, voice of Optimus Prime, lately lent his fabulous voice to a smooth animated overview to the successor of the incredibly productive Hubble Telescope, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope [JWST]. But Cullen's soft voice is far-off from the lone cause to be excited about JWST. If you're not excited about JWST, you must be dead inside. That or you just don't know plentiful about it to be excited.
JWST is so influential that astrophysicists aren't even certain what they'll be capable to use it for after it's out in space. Surely, they have ideas for it but, like Hubble, it's probable that Webb's major scientific milestones will be discoveries we can't even imagine to expect today. Just pay attention to what Michael Shara, Curator in the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History, had to say about it when spoke with him about the yet to come of space study:
“[The James Webb Space Telescope] has, in many ways, 100 times the capabilities that the Hubble Space Telescope does. We're actually going to be able to see the first stars forming, the first galaxies forming after the Big Bang. We're also going to be able to — we think — directly image planets orbiting other stars. There isn't a field in all of astrophysics that will not benefit tremendously. Just as Hubble was… not just a leap, but an enormous leap forward for all of astrophysics, including the discovery of Dark Energy (70% of… the energy of the Universe was unknown before Hubble), I find it almost impossible to believe that we won't make the same kinds of discoveries with the James Webb Telescope.
Once [we] started seeing things with Hubble that [we'd] never seen before, [we] pushed it harder and harder to do new things. The same will happen with the James Webb Space Telescope.
We will discover new things that we have no way of knowing about today, no way of guessing [because] our intuition isn't able to take us there. And those will be the great discoveries that actually show up in the coming 20 years, in the coming 30 years. It is really, in many ways, the golden age of astronomy — it's the very best time ever to be an astronomer.
If that doesn't excite you about JWST then I don't know what will.
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