This year marked the end of a decades-long wait for astronomers. The James Webb Space Telescope is finally in action.
The telescope, which launched in December 2021, released its first science data in July (SN: 8/13/22, p. 30) and immediately began surpassing astronomers’ expectations.
“We’ve realized that James Webb is 10 times more sensitive than we predicted” for some kinds of observations, says astronomer Sasha Hinkley of the University of Exeter in England. His team released in September the telescope’s first direct image of an exoplanet (SN: 9/24/22, p. 6). He credits “the people who worked so hard to get this right, to launch something the size of a
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