Iowa City, Iowa — Stargazers around the globe are jubilant over the spectacular, first images being released from NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope.
This includes Professor Keri Hoadley, an expert on far-ultraviolet astrophysics at the University of Iowa.
The size of a tennis court, the ten-billion dollar Webb is the most powerful telescope ever launched into space. It replaces the Hubble Space Telescope, which is still functioning, but with older technology from the 1980s.
Named for the former NASA administrator who led the agency during the moonshot years of the 1960s, Webb will be able to essentially peer back billions of years in history into the most distant galaxies.
She also says Webb will allow researchers to study planets around other stars, gazing into their atmospheres as they search for signs of life. Hoadley has submitted a proposal to possibly take place in 2023 that would use Webb in her own research, but she is constantly competing against hundreds of other space scientists for just 30 minutes of use. She wants to inspect a ring nebula which she believes collided with a star a few thousand years ago.
