Star Gazers

Hey, Stargazers!

The James Webb Space Telescope is one of the most astonishing telescopes of modern times and part of what makes it stand apart from others are these iconic yellow honeycomb mirrors.

So what do these mirrors do exactly?

Well, without getting too bogged down by the mathematics - we'll leave that to the NASA experts - the mirrors significantly help scientists see objects that are billions of light years away and they do this because light is sort of like rain.

Let me explain.

When it's raining, a big bucket captures more rain than a small bucket, right.

Telescopes are the same, which is why astronomers sometimes call them "light buckets."

Bigger mirrors mean more light captured and thus we see clearer pictures, but JWST's mirrors aren't the ordinary kind.

They have two distinctive features.

They're bright and golden in color and they're hexagonal in shape.

The gold color comes from - you guessed it - gold!

Each segment is made up mainly of a metal called beryllium, but then this metal is coated in a very thin layer of gold.

The gold significantly increases the reflectivity of a telescope in infrared red light which helps the telescope see things more clearly.

The honeycomb shapes though, that's pretty awesome.

The arrangement of the hexagons is distinctive.

We didn't have a rocket that could launch a telescope with a mirror as big as the whole thing, so we had to fold it up.

The segments allow for Webb to have the largest possible reflective surface area to make observations and it has the least amount of dead space in between each mirror once unfolded.

Overall, this incredible engineering has made for a really cool-looking telescope which has already started sending us some really cool-looking images.

And I know we can only see those images on a computer, but either way, keep looking up!