The Universe in New Light: What the James Webb Space Telescope Is Revealing About Everything
The most powerful telescope ever built is rewriting everything we thought we knew about the universe.
On 12 July 2022, NASA released five images that stopped the world. Thousands of galaxies captured in a patch of sky smaller than a grain of sand held at arm's length. A planetary atmosphere decoded in a single observation. A stellar nursery revealed in infrared light that had been hidden from every telescope that came before. The James Webb Space Telescope had opened its eye - and nothing in astronomy has been the same since.
The Universe in New Light is the complete guide to what JWST is finding, why it matters, and what it means for our understanding of the cosmos. Written with the same clarity and wonder that has made Marcus Veylan one of the most trusted voices in popular space science, this book brings you to the frontier of human knowledge at the exact moment it is being remade.
Inside this book:
How JWST was designed, nearly cancelled, rebuilt, and finally launched on Christmas Day 2021 - and why it can see what Hubble never couldThe shocking discovery of massive, fully-formed galaxies in the universe's first few hundred million years - and why they challenge everything our models predictedThe first stars: what Population III stars were, why they were unlike anything that exists today, and how JWST is finding their traces for the first time in historyStellar nurseries reimagined - the Pillars of Creation as never seen before, the discovery of Jupiter-Mass Binary Objects no one predicted, and what the birth of stars really looks like in infraredThe first detection of carbon dioxide on another world, the first photochemical signature in an exoplanet atmosphere, and the tantalising hint of a potential biosignature on a water world 120 light years awayTRAPPIST-1 - the seven-planet system that is JWST's most watched target, what the telescope has confirmed so far, and what a positive result would mean for life in the universeBlack holes caught feeding, merging, and recoiling - including the mysterious "Little Red Dots" that no model predictedDark matter, dark energy, and the Hubble tension - how JWST is closing in on the universe's deepest unsolved problemsWhat comes next: the questions JWST will spend its remaining twenty years answering - and why the most important discoveries may still lie ahead
The universe JWST is revealing is not the one astronomers expected. It is stranger, richer, older in some ways and younger in others - and we are only beginning to understand what it is telling us.
The universe is not what we expected. This is what it actually is.
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