French Guiana, South America / Iowa City, Iowa — NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope launched at 7:20 a.m. EST Saturday on an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, South America.
A University of Iowa researcher is eager to see what NASA’s newest telescope is able to find at the edges of the universe. The UI’s Keri Hoadley says astronomers are finding more planets orbiting distant stars and the Webb telescope will allow scientists to study those planets more closely.
The Webb telescope is designed to see infrared light just now reaching Earth from the first galaxies created after the Big Bang. Hoadley studies how stars form out of clouds of gas. She says with the Webb telescope, scientists will be able to essentially look back in time to see how the process worked in the beginning.
The Webb telescope is more than double the size of the Hubble telescope. Hoadley says the data captured by the Webb telescope will all be archived and will eventually be made public for researchers around the world.
