The James Webb space telescope has proven its worth year after year since its launch on Christmas Day, 2021. In 2024, it delivered five groundbreaking discoveries that reshaped our understanding of the universe.
Astronomers used the telescope to find ancient galaxies larger and brighter than expected, revealing a more active early universe where galaxy formation occurred quickly over just a few hundred million years. This challenges our current understanding of how galaxies grow and evolve.
The James Webb telescope also spotted two massive black holes weighing 50 million times the mass of the sun in mid-collision about 740 million years ago. The formation of these black holes is not yet fully understood, but the JWST may help unravel this mystery.
Cosmologists are still grappling with the “Hubble tension,” a discrepancy between measurements of the universe’s expansion rate from different methods and time periods. Despite confirming the tension, the James Webb telescope did not provide an answer to resolve it.
The discovery of carbon in a cloud just 350 million years after the Big Bang pushes back our understanding of when life could have first appeared in the cosmos. This finding suggests that essential elements necessary for life were present before the universe was even half a billion years old.
Most notably, researchers may have found subtle hints of Population III stars, the first generation of stars, in the light from a galaxy 430 million years after the Big Bang. The existence of these ancient stars would be a monumental discovery that could rewrite our understanding of the cosmic dawn and the universe’s early history.
Source: https://www.livescience.com/space/5-times-the-james-webb-telescope-rewrote-physics-in-2024