Webb telescope arrives safely. Now, Canadian astronomers are ready to unravel the mysteries of the universe

There's been a lot of breath-holding since the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launched on Dec. 25, but now astronomers can exhale: The $10-billion US telescope safely reached its destination Monday afternoon.

"We're just really excited to announce today that Webb is officially on station at it's L2 orbit," Keith Parrish, Webb observatory commissioning manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center said in a media teleconference. "This is just capping off a remarkable 30 days."

Lagrange Points are a kind of sweet spot in space where there is a pull between two objects like the sun and Earth and spacecraft can operate in either a stable or semi-stable orbit. Webb will sit at Lagrangian Point 2, or L2.

Webb is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990. Hubble is still hard at work, providing astronomers with insight into our universe, but Webb is a new and improved telescope that will peer further back to a time when our universe was in its infancy.

Although Webb has arrived safely at the Lagrange Point 2, the telescope will still undergo several months of testing to ensure everything is functioning properly.

After that, the science begins. 

"It's going to be amazing when we get the first data coming back," said Chris Willott, an astronomer with National Research Council Canada's Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Centre. 

"I can't even predict the things we're going to discover just within the first year. There are so many new things we're going to discover." 

Willott heads the CAnadian NIRISS Unbiased Cluster Survey (CANUCS) observing program, which will study some of the first galaxies that formed, as well as galaxy clusters. NIRISS stands for Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph.

One of the things Willott is most interested in is black holes. 

"We know that today most galaxies have large black holes in their centres, including our own galaxy," he said. "So I'll be trying to look at how those black holes got started in the very early universe because we know that some of them got very large, very quickly, which is kind of surprising."

Large telescopes (even ground-based ones) are available to professional astronomers who want to use them. However, they first have to submit proposals and have them approved. 

The reason Willott and more than a dozen other Canadian astronomers are getting time on Webb is that Canada contributed to the groundbreaking telescope by providing instruments: the fine-guidance sensor, which allows it to point and focus on objects. and the NIRISS that will be used to study the composition of the atmospheres on distant planets — called exoplanets — that orbit other stars.

Now, these astronomers are eagerly awaiting their time to study everything from the earliest galaxy formations to rogue planets (planets that don't have stars), and look for possible signs of life on other exoplanets.