Two Sydney students have led a globally significant effort to sharpen the focus of the James Webb Space Telescope, resolving issues in an onboard instrument and boosting the capacity of the world’s most powerful observatory to find Earth-like planets in our galaxy.

Dr Louis Desdoigts spent two years as a PhD student at the University of Sydney engineering an enormous piece of software that can fix blurry images taken by the $US10 billion ($15 billion) telescope.

Fellow student Max Charles then put the solution to work , creating high-resolution images that captured the volcanic craters studding one of Jupiter’s moons and a stream of white-hot matter blasting from a black hole.

“This work brings JWST’s vision into even sharper focus,” Desdoigts said. “It’s incredibly rewarding to see

See Full Page