Sky Matters: When and where to watch the Geminids meteor shower

"Knowing how galaxies form is important if we want to chart the history of formation of our own galaxy, the Milky Way."

A man watches a meteor during the Geminid meteor shower over Brimham Rocks, a collection of balancing rock formations in the Nidderdale Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in North Yorkshire, UK.

While it’s a little early to look back at the space highlights for 2022, there is one highlight that will be impossible to ignore. The beginning of the year saw the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) successfully deployed to its position some 1.5 million km from Earth where it will remain operational for the next 20 or more years, thanks in part to a perfect launch on a European Space Agency Ariane 5 rocket. Already Webb is sending back jaw-dropping images of the universe. We’re literally seeing distant galaxies which heretofore been impossible to see. 

It’s worth stressing that it hasn’t been “difficult” to see these, it has literally been “impossible”. And initial results are intriguing. It seems that galaxies, which are essentially groups of stars held together by their mutual gravity, may have formed much sooner after the Big Bang (13.7 billion years ago) than we had previously thought. This suggests that something in the “early universe” was different to our expectations and that makes this potentially very exciting. We can only speculate until we get more data, which Webb will give us in abundance.