Will it see the Big Bang? I was told the Hubble nearly saw that and this is said to be a MUCH more powerful telescope
That would be great! Another one is that it will be able to do a far better job of scoping out the centers of galaxies, too. The centers of galaxies tend to have a lot of dust. Since the Webb is in the infrared range, it will be able to cut through a lot of the dust to reveal what's really going on in there.
That should be interesting. I used to have this theory that the Black Holes in the centers of them eventually eat their galaxies but I've never heard of anyone observing a really JJUGGE Black Hole all by itself but then how would you see it?
Yes, how the heck does one see a black hole? Of course, if it is actively taking in mass, the mass will be pretty excited, giving off radiation before being consumed. But, if the black hole is just sitting there by itself, one would have to be pretty lucky to spot it, I think - detecting when something went behind it, maybe? There are ideas that there are large numbers of black holes all over the universe. In fact, there is an idea that dark matter is really just clouds of black holes between the size of an asteroid and a few times the mass of the Sun, as I remember it. Anyway, sparse clouds of relatively small black holes might look like dark matter, since we can't see them as individuals. Not sure how many think that's possible, but I've heard people talk about how many would be required, what size, where they would have come from, etc.
Is it nice how we have this incredible instrument which is bigger than the Palomar 200 incher and the government paid for it?
I really don't know anyone who thinks this telescope wasn't a mistake. One of the major issues it illuminated is that building objects of this size and complexity and then subjecting them to the rigors of Earth's gravity, launch forces, the violent shaking, the super origami of fitting into a nose cone, etc., is a barrier that we have to respect. It's a huge design limitation. It's an incredibly hard testing challenge. It cost us $10 Billion. We could have spent that on any number of other projects that would further our understanding of this universe as much as Webb will. One could argue that just due to the budget problem, this telescope set back science. Of course, that wasn't known at the outset. Another topic might be how we would do this today, using space based assembly to eliminate the requirement for all that delicate origami and remove so much of the design limitation.
What else could it have been spent on that would have furthered space science? If it was built in space, it would have taken 10 times longer to build and at much greater cost. And even if built in space, you would still have to attach it to a rocket vehicle to get it to the Langrange point that it currently occupies.
Yes, we couldn't have done it at that time. But, we could have done much more in exploring our solar system. The decisions NASA has had to make in terms of what projects to support can be seen in their decadal planning. And, those decisions, based almost entirely on budget, have been and continue to be gut wrenching. For example, there are Earth based antenna projects that can challenge some of what Webb is hoped to be able to do. For example, there is the square kilometer array radio telescope that can look through dust, examine the beginning of our universe, etc. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5136190 (Abstract available even to guys like me.) Earth based telescopes have the advantage of access. They can be updated easily. They can have new sensor technology added. Etc. So, advancing features such as coronographs, spectroscopy, etc. can be added and updated at far lower cost. Since the advent of adaptive optics, Earth based exploration even in visual frequencies has advanced in a major way. And, I don't mean to ignore the long list of satellite projects that have been killed.
