For months, the team in charge of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) maintained spy-level secrecy around the first targets that would be surveyed by the giant observatory. The suspense started building at the telescope's flawless launch on Christmas Day, 2021, and escalated sharply with the start of full operations this summer. Now, the first images are out, and they were worth the wait. JWST can't help but make notable discoveries everywhere it looks, because its capabilities go far beyond those of any of its predecessors. Its 6.5-meter-wide mirror, composed of 18 gold-coated beryllium hexagons, collects more than six times as much light as the Hubble Space Telescope. Its detectors can observe infrared rays out to a wavelength of 30 microns, allowing it to peer through dust and to view the stretched, reddened light from the early universe. Other space telescopes have focused on the infrared sky, but not with anything like JWST's sensitivity.
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