It’s a familiar story - a necessary trip to the emergency room that yields an astronomical bill because the on-call physician or the facility aren’t part of your health insurance network. The James Webb is expected to look back to just 250 million years after the Big Bang. The Hubble telescope can collect light from roughly 400 million years after when scientists estimate the Big Bang occurred. The more powerful the telescope, the further it can see into the past. Thus, using powerful telescopes, astronomers can collect this ancient light and take a peek into the past. That means when we capture life from the Andromeda Galaxy, the light itself has been traveling for roughly 2.5 million years to reach us. The closest galaxy to our own, the Andromeda Galaxy, is approximately 2.5 million light-years away.

The sun’s light, for example, takes over eight minutes to reach us. So how can a telescope give us a peek into events that occurred a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away? The universe is a vast place and it can take a long time for light to travel from one place to another. Using images captured with the James Webb Telescope, scientists hope to catch a glimpse of the earliest moments of our universe and to study early planetary system formation, among other things. Launched on Christmas Day, the James Webb Telescope is now NASA’s most powerful telescope and will allow scientists to dig deep into the universe’s past. Move over Hubble - a bigger, more advanced, and the arguably better telescope has entered the galaxy.

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