WASHINGTON - The James Webb Space Telescope lit up 2022 with dazzling images of the early universe after the Big Bang, heralding a new era of astronomy and untold revelations about the cosmos in years to come.
The most powerful observatory sent into space succeeded the Hubble telescope, which is still operating, and began transmitting its first cosmic images in July.
"It essentially behaves better than expected in almost every area," said Massimo Stiavelli, head of the Webb mission office at the Space Telescope Science Institute, in Baltimore.
Already scientists say the Webb telescope, now orbiting the sun at 1.6 million kilometres from Earth, should last 20 years, twice its guaranteed lifetime.
"The instruments are more efficient, the optics are sharper and more stable. We have more fuel and we use less fuel," said Stiavelli.
Stability is vital for image clarity.
Public appetite for the discoveries has been fed by the colouring of the telescope's images.
Light from the most distant galaxies has been stretched from the visible spectrum, viewable by the naked eye, to infrared -- which Webb is equipped to observe with unprecedented resolution.
This enables the telescope to detect the faintest glimmers from the distant universe at an unprecedented resolution, to see through the veil of dust that masks the emergence of stars in a nebula and to analyse the atmosphere of exoplanets, which orbit stars outside our solar system.
On July 12, the first images underlined Webb's capabilities unveiling thousands of galaxies, some dating back close to the birth of the Universe, and a star nursery in the Carina nebula.
Jupiter has been captured in incredible detail which is expected to help understand the workings of the giant gas planet.
The blue, orange and grey tones of the images from the "Pillars of Creation", giant dust columns where stars are born, proved captivating.
Scientists saw the revelations as a way of rethinking their models of star formation.
Researchers using the new observatory have found the furthest galaxies ever observed, one of which existed just 350 million years after the Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago.
The galaxies appear with extreme luminosity and may have started forming 100 million years earlier than theories predicted.
Webb also opened up a profusion of clusters of millions of stars, which could be the potential missing link between the first stars and the first galaxies.