The World's Most Advanced Telescope – Webb, is Coming to Malaysia

If you follow astronomy at all, you'll remember last year's main event: the James Webb Space Telescope finally made it to space, instantly becoming the field's new obsession. Hubble has served us faithfully for decades, but Webb is a different beast entirely. I'll spare you the pleasantries and get straight to the good stuff.

Webb's mirror is three times wider than Hubble's. Since light-gathering power scales with surface area, that translates to roughly ten times the efficiency—what takes Hubble a decade, Webb can accomplish in a year. But the real game-changer is wavelength. Hubble sees mainly in ultraviolet and visible light; Webb sees infrared. That design choice wasn't arbitrary. It was driven by two of astronomy's hottest questions: Is there life beyond our solar system? And what did the earliest galaxies look like?

The Hunt for Extraterrestrial Life

To find alien life, astronomers scrutinize the atmospheres of exoplanets, looking for telltale signatures—water, organic molecules, the chemical fingerprints of biology. Webb is transformative here. Water vapor glows brightest in infrared, but Earth's own atmosphere absorbs infrared like a sponge, blinding ground-based telescopes. Webb, floating beyond our atmosphere, has no such handicap. It's one of the few instruments that can actually study what exoplanet skies are made of.

The early results confirmed our hopes. At Webb's debut press conference, NASA showcased five findings to flex the telescope's muscles, including the precise detection of water vapor in an exoplanet's atmosphere. Admittedly, we already knew that particular planet had water—this was more proof of concept than discovery. And since the planet sits outside the habitable zone, it's not a candidate for life anyway. Still, watching that livestream, I felt my jaw hit the floor. If Webb can do this now, finding a habitable world with water and organic gases feels like a matter of when, not if. Give it a decade.

Archaeology at the Edge of Time

Webb's other superpower is cosmic archaeology—finding the universe's oldest galaxies. The logic here requires a moment of patience. The oldest galaxies are also the most distant, because light travels at a finite speed. The Sun, for instance, is about eight "light-minutes" away; the light hitting your eyes right now left the Sun eight minutes ago. In a very real sense, you're always looking at the past. (If the Sun exploded this instant, you'd have eight minutes before the news arrived.)

Scale that up. A galaxy thirteen billion light-years away means its light has been traveling for thirteen billion years. The images we capture show what the universe looked like thirteen billion years ago. The farther we look, the deeper into history we see.

But how do you find these ancient, impossibly distant galaxies? Here's where cosmic expansion becomes our ally. As the universe stretches, so does the light traveling through it—visible light gets pulled into longer wavelengths, shifting into infrared. The strategy practically writes itself: galaxies visible to Webb but invisible to Hubble are prime candidates for being the oldest things in existence.

The Unexpected Boom

Before Webb, Hubble had found exactly one galaxy dating to about 400 million years after the Big Bang. One. After Webb launched, the race was on. Within weeks, multiple teams announced they'd discovered a dozen galaxies younger than 500 million years, shattering records left and right. The current champion is roughly 300 million years old.

This might sound like academic leaderboard-climbing, but it's actually a bombshell. Astronomers expected Webb to find older galaxies than Hubble—that was the whole point. What nobody expected was finding so many, so fast. A "galaxy baby boom" that early in cosmic history contradicts our models. It clashes with observations of cosmic reionization. Webb's first few months of data have forced theorists back to the drawing board, rethinking everything we thought we knew about how galaxies form and evolve.

Webb Comes to Malaysia

Here's something you probably don't know: I'm organizing the first International Astronomical Union conference ever held in Malaysia, happening in Kuala Lumpur from February 6th to 10th. We'll have over 80 talks and 170 participants, many of them international heavyweights, and the focus will be Webb's discoveries and the formation of ancient galaxies. The last time the IAU held a conference in Southeast Asia was in Indonesia—thirty years ago.

The conference itself is aimed at researchers, but we wanted the public to share in the excitement. So we've invited three distinguished astronomers to give free public lectures at University of Malaya on February 8th. Everyone is welcome—whether you're an astronomy buff or have never looked through a telescope in your life.

A Personal Note

Two years ago, I used to write regularly for this paper, chatting about astronomy in the supplement pages. I kept meaning to pick up the pen again, but life got in the way—running a research team of over a dozen people, writing grant proposals until smoke came out of my ears, organizing this very conference. But if this gathering in Kuala Lumpur manages to spark even a few people's curiosity about the universe, that's more than enough for me.