🔭 איך טלסקופ בחלל מצליח לצלם כוכבים רחוקים?

The James Webb Space Telescope sits about a million and a half kilometers from Earth, much farther away than the Moon, at a special point in space where the gravity of the Sun and Earth balance out, letting the telescope 'float' there without burning much fuel. Unlike regular telescopes that see visible light, exactly like our own eyes do, Webb mostly observes infrared light, a kind of light the human eye cannot detect at all. That ability matters enormously, because infrared light can pass straight through huge clouds of dust and gas in space, the very places where new stars are born, much like a flashlight can cut through thick fog better than ordinary light. There's more: because light from the most distant stars and galaxies in the universe takes billions of years to reach us, when the telescope looks very far away, it is actually looking back in time, toward a period closer to when the universe itself formed, more than 13 billion years ago. The telescope's enormous mirror, made of 18 hexagonal segments coated in a thin layer of real gold, folds up to fit inside a rocket and then unfolds in space like a giant flower. Scientists around the world are already using the images Webb sends back to discover new planets, study breathtaking nebulas, and try to understand more clearly what our universe looked like in its very earliest moments.