Canadian astronomers champing at the bit for release of 1st images from James Webb telescope

Roughly 13.8 billion years ago, the groundwork to everything we are, everything we've come to understand, was born.

Most people know that event as the Big Bang, but the creation of what we see today took time. Lots of it. Over billions of years it transformed from a place of high density and temperature, then expansion and then cooling. Eventually the simplest of elements formed, like hydrogen and helium, still the most abundant elements in our universe.

The first stars ignited, piercing through the swampy darkness. Then they clumped together to form galaxies, islands of stars in this dark void, even superclusters of hundreds to thousands of galaxies all linked together. Supernovas — violent explosions of massive stars — blew up within these starry islands, creating more stars and eventually planets. Like Earth, where life sprung up in abundance.

On Tuesday, the most powerful telescope ever built will help humanity trace its roots back to the beginning of time by peering through gas and dust, shedding light on what has thus far been unseeable.

And maybe, even reveal an atmosphere around an exoplanet.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a joint mission between NASA, the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and the European Space Agency (ESA), will release several images — five at the very least — from peering through the darkness and the dust back to when the universe was in its infancy.

On Friday, the agencies announced their targets:

"You're going to see images that are absolutely stunning," said René Doyon, a professor at Université de Montréal and principal investigator of NIRISS, one of the four scientific instruments on the James Webb Space Telescope.

The JWST is a $10-billion powerhouse. Sitting in an orbit beyond the moon, the telescope is larger, and thus much more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope which orbits Earth. It also has different capabilities than Hubble, and as a result, is able to peer further back into time to when the universe was in its infancy.

Canada has played a major role in Webb's capabilities. First, there is the Canadian-built Fine Guidance Sensor (FGS), which is crucial to keeping the telescope on target. 

There's also the Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS), which will help astronomers study the atmospheres of exoplanets and observe distant galaxies.

Because of Canada's contribution, astronomers here will get a lot of time to use the telescope.

"Canadians should be proud to [be part] of this project," said Doyon, who's been working on Webb for the past 20 years. "Every single image, every single [bit] of data that will come out of Webb will have been guided by the eye, the Canadian eye from FGS. So … we should definitely be proud."

The farther away an object is, the longer it takes for its light to reach us. That means everything we see is as it was, not as it is.