Maggie Aderin built her first telescope when she was six years old. Now, her work will contribute to the search for evidence as to how the universe began – and clues to its fate.

The universe has been expanding since the Big Bang some 13 billion years ago. By peering deep into space we can track that mind-boggling process. “Light from objects very far away can shift so much that it moves out of the visible range and becomes infrared light, which humans cannot see but can perceive as heat,” Aderin says. “The James Webb Telescope will be able to detect this infrared light, allowing it to ‘see’ the light from objects that are extremely distant, light that would have left those objects only 130 million years after the Big Bang. By understanding the formation of the universe we can get a feel of how the universe will end. This will be determined by the density of matter and energy in the universe.”

Aderin has managed the development of a main component for the Near Infrared Spectrograph, which will be a key instrument on the telescope. The spectrograph can view up to 100 objects at once, detecting the spectrum of each one, and will give us an understanding of galaxy and star formation and chemical abundances. The James Webb Space Telescope was designed to obtain a better idea of the rate of the universe’s expansion and, it is hoped, shed some light on one of the biggest puzzles: the nature of the “dark energy” that appears to be accelerating the expansion of the universe.

There are various theories as to how the universe will end. 1) Gravity will slow everything down and it will collapse in on itself – a “big crunch”. 2) It will keep on expanding but more and more slowly and getting colder and colder – the “big chill”. 3) The mysterious dark energy will cause the universe to expand ever faster and everything will be torn apart in a “great rip”. 4) The universe is balanced and oscillates, and the big bang followed the collapse of the previous universe, so the same could happen again – the “big bounce”.

Science: Big questions, small answers

With leading scientists, we set out to answer some of the fundamental questions of life, the universe and everything

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It is conceivable that our universe is one of countless universes, an infinitesimal part of all existence. We may well have billions of years to figure that out. “But even if we do,” says Aderin, “and we do not like the answer, will there be much that we can do about it?”

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