We’ve never known
more about the universe than we do right
now—and that’s precisely the problem.
Every significant astronomical discovery of
the past 50 years—afterglow from the
big bang, evidence of dark matter,
planets circling distant stars, just to name a few—has helped to create an ever-larger and more perplexing set of cosmic questions: Is there life on those faraway planets? How
did the first stars form after the big bang?

NASA is searching for the first sunrise–that long-ago time when the first generation of stars ignited, flaring into life out of the uniform drabness that followed the Big Bang. The James Webb Space Telescope (named for the man who headed NASA in the 1960s) boasts a collapsible 20-foot mirror that will gather infrared light, unlike its predecessor the Hubble, which collected visible light. This will make the Webb far more able to catch rays from the universe's earliest stars.