In 2025, we might detect the first signs of life outside our solar system.
Crucial to this potential breakthrough is the 6.5-meter-diameter James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Launched aboard an Ariane-5 rocket from Kourou, a coastal town in French Guiana, in 2021, the JWST is our biggest space telescope to date. Since it began collecting data, this telescope has allowed astronomers to observe some of the dimmest objects in the cosmos, like ancient galaxies and black holes.
Perhaps more importantly, in 2022, the telescope has also provided us with the first glimpses of rocky exoplanets inside what astronomers call the habitable zone. This is the area around a star where temperatures