Opening the gates of the universe
Just a few days after NASA released images of the distant universe from the James Webb Space Telescope, Greek researcher Polychronis Patapis, a member of the team and one of the first to see them, said in comments to Kathimerini that “an exciting road has just opened up and is expected to hold many surprises.”
“It is like opening the gates of the universe,” said the Greek physicist from the control room in Baltimore where all the data sent by the telescope is collected and analyzed, referring to the images, which are the deepest and sharpest ever taken, and show what the universe looked like 100 to 250 million years after the Big Bang.
The James Webb has an instrument that “enables the telescope to see different colors at much longer wavelengths than, for example, the Hubble telescope. The longer the wavelength, the more sensitive we are to lower temperature sources,” he said.
It was sent to a spot 1.5 million kilometers from Earth called Second Lagrange or L2. “We needed a spot that was dark and cold,” he said.
