In light of everyone losing their minds over the great high resolution JWST images, what’s the functional application of this new information? Considering that we are so far away from even the closest star that interstellar travel is extremely unlikely, how does this new information help us?

Question

Let me state for the record that **I am not trolling**, and I am blown away by the imagery as much as the next person.
But what can we do with this new information? Where does it take us? How does it help us?

What’s next?

In: 262

Answer 1

As we look further away, we also are looking further in the past. Being able to look this far in the past might help us decide which of our theories about the very early universe are right and which ones are wrong.

There are a whole slew of problems where we do not have enough information to know which solutions are correct. Which ones, if any, will be helped? We won’t know that until we start looking.

Many people think that science breakthroughs happen with a “Eureka”, but in truth, most breakthroughs happen with a “That’s strange…”