So this is a fun one.
It's a chance to celebrate.
We've been in space doing science for two years now,
and this is a penguin and an egg.
Really, it's a galaxy.
It's two galaxies that are merging that have,
that have done what galaxies are doing all the time.
Merging, exchanging stars eventually will turn into one much bigger galaxy.
So it's neat.
It looks like, you know, when we look out into space,
sometimes we see familiar things from home.
I am so gratified that in the first two years
we've done what we said we would do, which is look back to the most distant
as far back as we can see and see back to a time
when galaxies were really young, when the universe was really young.
We've done that. That's what we built the telescope to do.
It's working.
We've been able to show that galaxies formed very quickly,
very rapidly in the early universe when when galaxies
like our own got started, they did it with vigor.
They did it quickly.
They formed black holes.
We know those black holes are ubiquitous.
They're they're everywhere and we know the galaxies.
So we didn't know that before Webb. And now we do.
The Webb telescope is doing fantastic.
We've gotten through two years.
We expect to have many more years with this telescope.
What I'm looking forward to in particular, are the discoveries
that are coming in about planets orbiting other stars, exoplanets.
We've studied a bunch of exoplanets.
We've studied big ones like Jupiter and Saturn, And looking at
what their atmospheres are made of.
So we're doing chemistry, but on another planet, we're
also studying planets that are small and rocky, like our own.
And we're trying to find planets like that that may have atmospheres.
That's really challenging.
And it's forcing us to use the telescope right at the limits
of what it can do.
So the Webb telescope
looks at a tiny piece of the sky at once.
You know, we we find one little piece, and then we zoom in with a laser focus.
And but we had to know where to point.
And so there are other telescopes that see large parts of the sky
at once, like NASA's upcoming Roman Space Telescope, that do these big surveys.
And they find rare things like quasars and merging galaxies
like this release image.
And they tell us what we should go look at.
And so Webb works in partnership with those survey telescopes.
And then it also works in partnership with telescopes
that see other kinds of light, light like X-rays, like the Chandra,
the Space Space Observatory, the light that's too blue for Hubble,
that's ultraviolet or optical, like the Hubble Space Telescope.
So it's I think about it like a baseball team.
These telescopes have different skills and they all work together to tell
us what's out there.
So if you want to learn more
go to nasa.gov/Webb with two b’s in Webb.
One of the neatest things about space
is that when you look back into space, you're looking back into time.
And normally in our everyday lives, lives so we can't see far enough
for that to be useful. Right?
And but you know, the best we can do with our eyes
is maybe see galaxies that are, you know, millions of years light years away.
But with a telescope like Webb, we are looking so far out into space
that that light has been traveling from that distant galaxy to us
for most of the age of the universe.
So when we look back into space, we're looking back in a time.
And Webb has now found galaxies that we are seeing as they looked
when the universe was only about 300 million years old.
The universe is now 13.8 billion years old.
So we're seeing back almost to the edge.
We're seeing galaxies. When they were babies.