IN 2022, THE JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE PROVIDED US WITH NEW VIEWS OF THE UNIVERSE
This year marked the end of a decades-long wait for astronomers. The James Webb Space Telescope is finally in action. The telescope, which is scheduled to launch in December 2021, released its first science data in July (SN: 8/13/22, p. 30) and quickly exceeded astronomers' expectations. "We discovered that James Webb is ten times more sensitive than we predicted" for certain types of observations, says Sasha Hinkley of the University of Exeter in England. In September, his team published the telescope's first direct image of an exoplanet (SN: 9/24/22, p. 6). "The people who worked so hard to get this right, to launch something the size of a tennis court into space on a rocket and get this sensitive machinery to work perfectly," he says. And I consider myself extremely fortunate to be the recipient of this." The JWST telescope, also known as the Hubble Space Telescope, was designed to peer further back into the history of the universe than ever befor...