The beautiful cosmic images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope

The greatest challenge humanity faces in the field of exploration is physically far beyond our reach: deep space.

PSR J0737−3039, the first known binary system consisting of two pulsars
Sedna, the mysterious reddish world that takes more than 11,400 years to orbit the Sun

Space exploration is primarily carried out through the acquisition of images and radio signals, since on a cosmic scale, the range of our spacecraft and probes is extremely small. Space telescopes are particularly important tools for this exploration, as their location outside Earth's atmosphere provides them with image clarity that ground-based telescopes cannot achieve.

The most famous space telescope is the Hubble Space Telescope, launched by the US (NASA) and European (ESA) space agencies on April 24, 1990, with the purpose of capturing visible light. The largest instrument of its kind launched to date is the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). December 25 marked the fourth anniversary of its launch in 2021 by NASA, ESA, and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) aboard ESA's Ariane 5 rocket, flight VA256, from French Guiana. This telescope captures infrared radiation and submillimeter light, that is, light with a longer wavelength than visible light and electromagnetic radiation located between the far-infrared and microwaves, respectively.

This telescope is named after James E. Webb, who was NASA's second administrator (the space agency that spearheaded this project) from 1961 to 1968. The JWST has a 6.5-meter primary mirror, much larger than the Hubble's 2.4-meter mirror. The James Webb Space Telescope cost as astronomically as its exploration mission: $10 billion.

The JWST orbits the Sun at a distance of 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. Its purpose is to detect extremely distant and ancient cosmic objects. Among its findings are not only objects that were beyond our view until now, but also some objects that were only hypotheses, such as the three possible dark stars JADES-GS-z13-0, JADES-GS-z12-0, and JADES-GS-z11-0, identified by the JWST in December 2022. On December 25, to celebrate the fourth anniversary of its launch, the ESA released a fascinating video with some of the amazing images captured by this telescope:

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Main image: NASA, ESA, CSA and STScI Image processing: J. DePasquale, A. Pagan and A. Koekemoer (STScI). The protostar within the dark cloud L1527, in an image captured by the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) of the James Webb Space Telescope.