How does the James Webb Space Telescope work? | Puzzling Science with Maggie Aderin
She helped build one of the most sensitive instruments ever flown into space and today she's racing the clock to finish a jigsaw puzzle. 🧩In this episode of Puzzling Science, space scientist Dame Maggie Aderin talks us through the James Webb Space Telescope - the largest space telescope ever built, sitting 1.5 million km from Earth - while piecing together a puzzle in real time. Maggie worked on NIRSpec, the near-infrared spectrograph that lets JWST split starlight into its component wavelengths and analyse the chemistry of objects trillions of kilometres away.
In this Episode, Maggie shares why JWST looks in infrared instead of visible light, how its heat shield and 6.5m mirror work, why it sits at the L2 Lagrange point, and why the telescope is effectively a time machine - showing us galaxies as they looked billions of years ago. Along the way, some of Webb's earliest discoveries are throwing up genuine surprises: early galaxies that seem to have formed faster than current theory predicts, forcing scientists to rethink their models.
🧩 Puzzling Science is a series where a different scientist tackles a jigsaw puzzle while walking us through their specialist subject — one piece, and one idea, at a time.
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CHAPTERS:
0:00 Welcome to Puzzling Science
0:34 Meet Maggie Aderin & her work on JWST
1:57 Inside NIRSpec: the instrument Maggie built
2:20 What makes James Webb so unique
4:23 JWST: a time machine to the early universe
5:41 Turning invisible light into images we can see
6:31 Clever tech: micro shutters & the integral field unit
9:12 Surprising discoveries rewriting our theories
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#JamesWebbSpaceTelescope #JWST #SpaceScience #MaggieAderin #PuzzlingScience #Astrophysics
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