The James Webb telescope is a giant leap in the history of stargazing.

Our view of the universe will never bethe same.

Nearly a million miles away, the James Webb Space Telescope just took a picture. Since transmitting its first data in late 2021, Webb has made stunning discoveries, including a plume of water spanning 6,000 miles in our solar system and a galaxy that formed only 390 million years after the Big Bang, or more than 13 billion years ago.

The telescope is an engineering marvel: Its massive mirror makes it possible to collect light from the faintest objects. It has multiple ways of blocking and dissecting that light, giving us detailed portraits of distant galaxies and close neighbors alike. And its position orbiting the sun allows it to take pictures around the clock, sending us up to 57.2 gigabytes of data — the equivalent of tens of thousands of standard iPhone photos — every day. What’s it telling us about our past — and the future of cosmology?

I. Ways of Seeing

Space is a dark, dusty place — to the human eyeball. The light that is visible to us represents a tiny slice of the light that’s in the universe. Humans perceive different types of light as colors: violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange and red. Bluer light is more energetic, and when it encounters dust — the tiny, solid particles floating around up there — it scatters, obscuring things from our view. Webb can see light just beyond what we can see, called infrared, that can easily pierce through dust. Animals like goldfish have evolved to see infrared light so they can navigate in murky waters.

II. With Our Own Two Eyes

For centuries, we could record only what was visible to the human eye, first with illustrations, then with photographs. Cave drawings, monuments and folklore that have survived for thousands of years show us that early humans had a sophisticated understanding of the cosmos.

In the 1200s, the Maya made records of Venus’s position in the sky on paper made from fig-tree fiber. Hieroglyphics carved into their monuments feature three stones surrounding a fire, a cosmic hearth of creation. Today K’iche’ Maya people in Guatemala understand the constellation of Orion to include those three stones and the fire in the center to be the Orion Nebula.

III. Dissecting Light

Perhaps Webb’s greatest power is not to capture light but to scatter and measure it. In 1789, William Herschel used a handcrafted telescope to discover Enceladus, the sixth-largest of Saturn’s 146 moons. Later, he used a prism to disperse sunlight into a rainbow and, using three thermometers, found that the temperatures of each individual color — and colors beyond those visible — were different. He had discovered infrared radiation and furthered the field of spectroscopy.

On Webb, thermometers and prisms have been replaced with dozens of filters and intricate mechanisms. One tool has a quarter of a million tiny shutters that can be used to gather light from 100 individual objects simultaneously. The spectra that it creates reveal granular details — chemical composition, temperature and mass — of individual stars, planets and galaxies. Recently, Webb trained its instruments on Saturn.

IV. Seeing Beyond

In 1995, Robert Williams, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute at the time, pointed Hubble at an empty piece of sky and left it there for 10 days. His approach was risky — normally scientists use their precious telescope time to look at known objects. “Throughout my scientific life, I tended to rely on instinct, probably more than I should,” Williams says. He and his colleagues chose a spot just above the Big Dipper.

V. Knowing and Unknowing

It’s tempting to decide that all this seeing amounts to knowing. But some of Webb’s observations challenge fundamental assumptions in our timeline of the universe. For instance, we thought it would take more than a billion years after the Big Bang for enough gas and stars to coalesce into big galaxies like our own, but Webb has found more than a dozen big, bright galaxies that may have started forming in the first hundred million years after the Big Bang. Six galaxies in particular are so bright that in order to fit into our current thinking about galaxy formation, every single atom in the area that they were forming would have had to become a star.

‘‘In general, star formation is very inefficient,’’ says Erica Nelson, assistant professor of astrophysics at the University of Colorado Boulder. ‘‘Only like 5 percent of the gas becomes stars, and in these galaxies it’s 100 percent.’’ Astronomers are trying to account for this by tweaking different variables in their standard models of galaxy formation, including reconsidering the role of dark energy and dark matter. In the latest models of cosmology, these unobserved phenomena make up 95 percent of the universe.

Webb helps us know but also to “unknow”: It gives us stunning new discoveries while simultaneously challenging us to rethink and rebuild our understanding of the past.