The current understanding is that the universe is 13.8 billion years old. How can the James webb either prove or disprove that? Can it potentially prove a much older universe(like an infinite universe)?
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There’s some error bars on that number. Even when you just see one number listed on wikipedia, we are only so certain about it. JWST, being vastly more precise than any other telescope should be able to narrow down those error bars far more than the other scopes
That’s not what it is doing at all.
I’m not sure where you and all the others who keep asking this question are getting that from. It seems to be a very common misunderstanding of its mission.
The JWT’s mission is to observe early galaxy formation hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang.
Our determination of the age of the universe is dependent on the rate of the expansion of the universe. In other words, we see where things in the universe are now, figure out how fast they’re moving away from each other, and work backwards to figure out when everything was in the same place. It turns out that we get 2 close but statistically different numbers depending whether we’re looking at the oldest light in the universe or light from closer objects. This discrepancy creates uncertainty – we’re not sure of the measurements are wrong or maybe there’s something in our model of the universe that’s wrong. The JWST will be able to observe these closer objects in great detail, and that should hopefully tell us whether our measurements are correct or not, and either way, it will put us one step closer to solving the discrepancy.
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