What the Webb Space Telescope Will Show Us Next | The New Yorker
For J.W.S.T., the questions that we knew we were going to ask were: What did the first billion years look like? How did galaxies get started? From the data we have so far, we’re going to do a great job on that question. We are finding galaxies further back than we knew were possible. We’re seeing back in time to about three hundred million years after the big bang. The elevator pitch we used when J.W.S.T. was sold was that we’ll see the baby pictures of the universe. And we will definitely do that.
J.W.S.T. was also built to study the atmospheres of planets orbiting other stars. That’s the other really high-profile science case. And we’re doing that, but we haven’t gotten far enough yet during our first year of science observations.