In July 2022, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope released its first images, looking further back in time than ever before to show our universe in stunningly beautiful detail. But that was just the beginning: With tons of new data and spectacular images flooding in, Webb is allowing scientists to peer deep in time to try to answer some of astronomy’s biggest questions. When – and how – did the first stars and galaxies form? And can we see the fingerprints of life in the atmospheres of distant worlds–or even within our own solar system?
Correction: This film originally showed an incorrect spectrograph for calcium at 10:30. The graphic has been updated.
Chapters 00:00 Introduction 04:11 The James Webb Space Telescope’s First Images 05:47 Searching for Life on Exoplanets: Are We Alone in the Universe? 14:40 Looking for Life in Our Own Solar System: Moons of Jupiter and Saturn 18:52 Adjusting New Images from JWST: Science Meets Art 23:55 Studying Supermassive Black Holes and Merging Galaxies 30:25 Detecting the Oldest Galaxies with the JWST 37:13 Troubleshooting the New Telescope’s Light Measurements 42:12 Detecting the Atmosphere of a Rocky Exoplanet 46:28 Results from the Team’s New Studies 51:05 Conclusion
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