Said NASA administrator Bill Nelson, quoted in "James Webb telescope takes super sharp view of early cosmos" (BBC).
President Biden dragged the profound down to earth, to rah-rah-America-is-great politics: "These images are going to remind the world that America can do big things, and remind the American people — especially our children — that there's nothing beyond our capacity. We can see possibilities no-one has ever seen before. We can go places no-one has ever gone before."
You're looking at an image that shows a tiny part of the universe, including what is 13 billion years old, and that's what you want to say? That is so far beyond the existence of Earth, let alone the existence of human beings. It makes me think of how infinitesimal America is, not how big. We can look back 13.5 billion years, where no one has gone before, but we are not going there, and it is something — something huge — that is beyond our capacity.
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I looked at that and was stunned. I could not take my eyes off of it. If nothing else, you do realize the incomprehensible size of the universe. And you can imagine how many different beings and lives exist out there beside our our own. And if nothing else, you'd have to realize just how insignificant and stupid we are. And that there are things greater than us, greater than anything we can even think of.
To have Joe Biden anywhere near this is perfect. It is the most perfect example of the incomprehensible enormity of the cosmos posing next to what could the the dumbest person ever to be a leader on this stupid little planet.
I'd be more embarrassed than terrified if aliens did bother to show themselves here. I think I'd feel the need to apologize for the mess and my 'idiot' family of humans.
The really amazing thing is that during that long trip, no time at all passed for the photon. For it, its like it was emitted right now.
yeah - I'll bet Hunter worked really hard on the Webb telescope. Is that next? out of Joe and Stephen Colbert's mouths?
Mindless politicians love to bloviate (and Biden is mindless for sure). So what else is new?
how high is the price of gas at the edge of the universe?
They know exactly how old the universe is? The Webb telescope does improve our cosmic imaging capability, but it was a horribly run project that carried a lot of risk. And the risks did manifest at the cost of billions of dollars and years of delay. It was only by the government backing of that risk that allowed it too succeed. One needs to only look at Sri Lanka to understand when you run out of other people’s money on risky projects.
Joe Biden said...
We can see possibilities no-one has ever seen before. We can go places no-one has ever gone before.
Why didn't he just say, "Boldly go where no man has gone before?"
Okay, woke Captain Kirk.
'And since we know the Universe is 13.8 billion years old...'
We know this?
To go where no man has gone before...
To even compare us as a speck of dust to the universe is an exaggeration. I always get a certain sadness when viewing photos like this since I know that anything beyond our immediate neighborhood out here in the galactic boondocks. We will see more and more over time as our technology grows yet the majority of the universe will be forever beyond our reach.
If the universe is rapidly expanding how do we know the light we are seeing has traveled 13 billion years? Maybe it just stayed in one place and we are finally catching up to it.
remind the American people — especially our children — that there's nothing beyond our capacity
drill in the gulf of mexico?
evacuate Afghanistan?
count votes?
'These images are going to remind the world that America can do big things, and remind the American people — especially our children — that there's nothing beyond our capacity.'
A very thoughtful and appropriate comment by the President.
How about this...Oh, MY GOD!
"To have Joe Biden anywhere near this is perfect. It is the most perfect example of the incomprehensible enormity of the cosmos posing next to what could the the dumbest person ever to be a leader on this stupid little planet."
He probably thinks that's where Santa Clause lives.
Hunter Biden's tax payer funded Hooker said...
"how high is the price of gas at the edge of the universe?"
I'm pretty sure It's still less than two bucks a gallon.
since we know...
This is why people are suspicious of "science."
The age of the universe has not been proven. We don't "know" when it began. Rather, there is a good theory of when that happened.
how do they know this, the redshift is that pronounced its stands to reason, that the other side of the universe would 26 billion light yeara
My morse code thoughts as a 12 year old have already made it to over 700 star systems.
"and remind the American people — especially our children — that there's nothing beyond our capacity"
Including the ability to elect a shiittehead as president.
Hey, he got 81,000,000 votes. Go, Joe, go.
we call nelson the space cadet, because he never seemed to come back to earth
as if the average American remembers what happened 3 days ago.
"We can see possibilities no-one has ever seen before."
A little wokeish, but still: for the first time in the history of this blog, and probably the last, I'm with Joe.
Did he make the comments from a “bogeda” in the Bronx while eating unique breakfast tacos? “si su pwodway”!
NASA is welfare for engineers.
"It makes me think of how infinitesimal America is ..."
NASA isn't a space agency. It's a photo blog. It's the federal government's Instagram page.
This is a very expensive photo taken by a very expensive kind of camera that we paid for that reveals nothing. Absolutely nothing we didn't already know. In a time where our economy is literally in crumbles because our government has no discipline and is spending our future wildly on a bunch of meaningless BS like this photograph.
It's NASA that is infinitesimal. And we need to cut this kind of crap out of our government until it gets its spending under control.
And since we know the Universe is 13.8 billion years old
The first 10 billion years or so were just for practice and don't count.
"These images are going to remind the world that America can do big things, and remind the American people — especially our children — that there's nothing beyond our capacity. "
Is it strange that the man saying this is the guy who keeps coming up with excuses for why he can't keep prices down and baby formula on the shelves? Biden wants you looking at the stars so you don't see how badly he's doing.
Behold the majesty of starlight so old Joe wasn't even in Congress when it left that star to come here!
I thought people who wrote for the White House were the creme de la crème.
These white house writers are more like... mac and cheese.
Yeah this is the first time I've noticed a precise digit to the right of the decimal. Is it new?
I bet the breakfast tacos are really something way out there.
Scientific knowledge is always contingent. It could change tomorrow if we learn something new.
The same is true for ALL kinds of knowledge. We say we know things, but we could know something else tomorrow.
Scientists have observed and calculated the rate of expansion of the universe. Tomorrow we might learn that they miscalculated. We might find reasons to believe that the expansion is nonuniform. We might find reasons to believe that the rate has been faster or slower in the past.
But if we assume that what we observe locally today is true everywhere and has been true throughout the past (which is the default cosmological assumption: we do not live in a “special” place and time, different from other places and times), then projecting that expansion back 13.8 billion years, all of space and all of energy and matter is a single point. Anything before/outside that is unknowable.
In summary: we know the universe is 13.8 billion years old. But tomorrow we might know otherwise.
And if we do, it may be because of discoveries made with the James Webb Space Telescope.
The really amazing thing is that during that long trip, no time at all passed for the photon. For it, its like it was emitted right now.
Einstein the dog's been there & done that:
"He's fine. And he's completely unaware that anything happened. As far as he's concerned, the trip was instantaneous. That's why his watch is a minute behind mine - he 'skipped over' that minute to instantly arrive at this moment in time."
Now I feel badly about the photons who made this very long journey only to crash into stuff here and become...part of the heat death of the universe? Sad.
‘And since we know the Universe is 13.8 billion years old…’
We know this?
Obviously, not all of us know this — but that particular datum of information has been known by humanity since the early 2000's.
As an article in the journal Science put it back in 2003: [quoting…]
A lonely satellite spinning slowly through the void has captured the very essence of the universe. In February, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) produced an image of the infant cosmos, of all of creation when it was less than 400,000 years old. […]
Lingering doubts about the existence of dark energy and the composition of the universe dissolved when the WMAP satellite took the most detailed picture ever of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The CMB is the most ancient light in the universe, the radiation that streamed from the newborn universe when it was still a glowing ball of plasma. This faint microwave glow surrounds us like a distant wall of fire. The writing on the wall — tiny fluctuations in the temperature (and other properties) of the ancient light — reveals what the universe is made of. […]
Just as the tone of a bell depends on its shape and the material it's made of, so does the “sound” of the early universe — the relative abundances and sizes of the hot and cold spots in the microwave background — depend on the composition of the universe and its shape. WMAP is the instrument that finally allowed scientists to hear the celestial music and figure out what sort of instrument our cosmos is.
The answer was disturbing and comforting at the same time. The WMAP data confirmed the incredibly strange picture of the universe that other observations had been painting. The universe is only 4% ordinary matter, the stuff of stars and trees and people. Twenty-three percent is exotic matter: dark mass that astrophysicists believe is made up of an as-yet-undetected particle. And the remainder, 73%, is dark energy.
The tone of the cosmic bell also reveals the age of the cosmos and the rate at which it is expanding, and WMAP has nearly perfect pitch. A year ago, a cosmologist would likely have said that the universe is between 12 billion and 15 billion years old. Now the estimate is 13.7 billion years, plus or minus a few hundred thousand. Similar calculations based on WMAP data have also pinned down the rate of the universe's expansion — 71 kilometers per second per megaparsec, plus or minus a few hundredths — and the universe's “shape”: slate flat.
[/unQuote]
____
(Charles Seife, “Illuminating the Dark Universe,” Science, Vol. 302, Issue No. 5653 [2003-12-19], pp. 2038-2039)
Yes, light travels at 186.000 miles a second. The nearest star is 4 light years way. which means if you could build a spacecraft that went 20.000 miles a second. It could go the moon and back in 20 seconds, and it would take 36 years to get to Alpha Centuri.
That's how vast space is. And how impossible it was space aliens or us to travel to other solar systems, let alone other Galaxy's is. IRC, the fastest man made object has reached 20,000 miles per HOUR.
That's why religious flat earthers don't like the space program and especially NASA. It makes God's creation seem meaningless. I dunno. Maybe it's more profound. If we are the only one's out there, we are pretty special in an infinite universe. But, even if we aren't alone, we're all still special in our own way. Just ask a millennial.
you're going back almost to the beginning
I don't really get that.
Okay, so something swelled up and popped like 13 billion years ago, but what was it and what made it swell up like that in the first place? Why is that the beginning? Do we even know what popped? Maybe that was the end of whatever it was. Fucking science.
My morse code thoughts as a 12 year old have already made it to over 700 star systems.
That's pretty cool, but I hope we're not invaded by a race of angry space women as a result.
If you zoom in and look really, really closely you can see Jimmy Hoffa and an honest politician...
"Do we even know what popped? Maybe that was the end of whatever it was."
A pimple. On the ass of God.
What will we do when the Webb telescope breaks down next year?
OMG. A politician with low polling numbers and losing support from his own party gives a feel good press conference to highlight a Deep State Deep Space home run.
---"I have seen the first images and they are spectacular," deputy project scientist Dr Amber Straughn said of Tuesday's further release.
Yes, I have seen Dr. Straughn's picture and it is spectacular.
The stars one was good, too.
’This is a very expensive photo taken by a very expensive kind of camera that we paid for that reveals nothing.’
That’s an interesting take. But the near infrared spectrograph revealed this morning the first spectrum of an exoplanet (WASP-96b) and it’s atmosphere, showing water and water vapor (clouds).
You guys are sadly mistaken. The Bible teaches us that God created the universe 5000 years ago. But He created it with all all those fossils, redshifted light etc. already in place, just to fool wise guys like you. It’s a test of faith, and you failed. You’re in for a big surprise on Judgment Day.
Congrats to Biden's handlers for finally finding a way to make him seem young in comparison to something.
And in all those billions of galaxies, there were millions of civilizations that rose, fell and were extinguished billions of years ago.
Gilbar said:
remind the American people — especially our children — that there's nothing beyond our capacity
count votes?
Pretty funny.
The universe is so large and profound, and Biden is so small and petty. Quite the contrast.
Has anyone determined the carbon footprint of this endeavor yet?
Incomprehensible. Obviously we are not alone.
That is so far beyond the existence of Earth, let alone the existence of human beings.
Spot on.
Those of faith, call it humility. Understanding that there is a God. I'm not it. To walk upon this earth, with all my brothers and sisters, is ALL I can do. With a peek back in time ~8 billion years, is humbling and refocus the mind on the here and know. Yesterday is never coming back, and no guarantee tomorrow will arrive for me.
Blogger rhhardin said..."My morse code thoughts as a 12 year old have already made it to over 700 star systems."
If it were anyone else making this comment I'd assume they just made the number up.
Blogger Mike (MJB Wolf) said..."Yeah this is the first time I've noticed a precise digit to the right of the decimal. Is it new?"
Nah, we've had this kind of precision for quite awhile. Since we started getting good CMB data, I think.
Jake @ 8:33
You totally misunderstand faith. This proves God. Not the other way around. I find it impossible to consider that picture and think ALL of this is just a random arrangement of atoms.
Blogger Yancey Ward said..."What will we do when the Webb telescope breaks down next year?"
If that happens, I'm blaming you.
Seriously, I fear that.
It's audition time. Slow Joe is auditioning for a role in a remake of "Plan 9 From Outer Space"---a late 50's floperoo justifiably roasted as "the worst movie of all time". Doesn't matter which part Joe is auditioning for--he'd be perfect in any one of the roles.
In fact under Joe, we are suffering through one of the worst Presidential terms of all time. Of course it could get worse if Kamala became President.
"That's how vast space is. And how impossible it was space aliens or us to travel to other solar systems...."
It is not certain that interstellar travel by space aliens is impossible; it only seems so to us based on our current knowledge and technological capabilities, but that is not a measure that necessarily applies to other beings.
@Temujin,
"I'd be more embarrassed than terrified if aliens did bother to show themselves here. I think I'd feel the need to apologize for the mess and my 'idiot' family of humans."
There was a cartoon circulating online awhile back. Aliens land, and proclaim, "We are taking over!" The humans respond, "Oh, thank God!" "Praise Jesus!"
Given that Webb is an IR telescope, I didn't think the "first" image would be that aesthetically spectacular. I was wrong.
Going to have to get used to octagonal diffraction spikes.
"you're going back almost to the beginning. I don't really get that."
It's because light can only travel so fast. The photons that make up the light you're seeing right now from the sun left the sun 8 minutes ago, because we can measure the distance to the sun and work out how long it would take ANYTHING to get from there to here (light being the fastest thing that could get from there to here.)
So, if you can measure distance, you can work out how "old" the photons are and thus how old the light is. And our astronomers have pretty good guesses as to how far away certain things are, and thus, how old they are based on how long it took the light from that thing to reach us.
We cannot even say with any certainty that the things we are seeing in space are even there any more. We just know that they were there 13 million light years ago.
It’s ALL too much!
that there's nothing beyond our capacity
Joe should not be lecturing about limits to one’s capacity.
I like the dogma of a 13.8 billion year old universe being used to give a sense of scale. But how do they know the universe is 13.8 billion years old? Numbers. The Book of Numbers.
Meanwhile within the cosmos science community an old school of thought is reawakening from its coma: the Infinite Universe Theory. If true, that 13.8 billion is off by, oh, I don't know, an infinitabillion years.
Young earth creationists have a real problem with light speed and stars. But Big Bangers have a real problem with EVERYTHING. Their Bible starts out "In the Beginning -- if there Was a Beginning -- Something Happened."
Me, I'm a G.H. Pember gapper. Old universe that had a beginning and the force behind it, of course, was God.
Blogger Yancey Ward said..."What will we do when the Webb telescope breaks down next year?"
From "Doubt and Certainty", Rotham T, Sudarshan G: "Theoretical physicists write books. Experimental physicists spend their days building and fixing apparatus and, when the stars are in the right position, take data."
We had an oft invoked phrase in the lab: "Laboratory entropic decay". We were always fixing something. "Quick! Grab data now before something else breaks!"
Quick, STSI! Take the data NOW!
Galileo was wrong, by the way. We do not live in a helio-centric universe. The sun is not the center, not by a long shot.
But he was infinitestimallly righter than the Church which thought the earth was the center of all. Tee hee.
Although I find Biden to be a dumb, senile old man on his best days, and I'm not sure why anyone's highlighting his reaction to this. . . .that wasn't a bad thing to say, IMO. NASA is, as someone else mentioned, a bloated, inefficient jobs program for engineers (actually mostly barely-competent project managers), but they get some things right, despite cost overruns.
It's WAY more than pretty pictures.
@Original Mike - The images are manipulated. Infrared is shortened to visible light. Contrast is heightened. Colors are added to make the images aesthetically pleasing.
@Original Mike - The images are manipulated. Infrared is shortened to visible light. Contrast is heightened. Color is added to make them aesthetically pleasing.
@Smiling Jack "You guys are sadly mistaken. The Bible teaches us that God created the universe 5000 years ago. But He created it with all all those fossils, redshifted light etc. already in place, just to fool wise guys like you." I'm guessing you're being sarcastic, but Elon Musk believes this - why don't you? If it's a simulation, you start with the part you're interested in.
God. Probably not a Christian but God non the less. At least we learned to speak God's language - mathematics.
Words mean things.
That includes the word "know," which denotes certainty.
The essence of the scientific method is testing. The age of has not been tested to any degree of certainty. At best it can speak of probabilities.
"It is not certain that interstellar travel by space aliens is impossible; it only seems so to us based on our current knowledge and technological capabilities, but that is not a measure that necessarily applies to other beings." It is not certain that it applies to us either. Even if we are forever limited by light-speed, we could eventually reach nearby systems. Then we could reach nearby systems from there. In a billion years we would fill the galaxy, and begin on others.
This is the origin of the "Fermi paradox" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox). Not that it is impossible for intelligent life to fill the universe. Rather, that it is hard to understand why it has not.
For all those who ask, "How do we KNOW the universe began 13.8 billion years ago?":
The chapter "Finding the Age of the Universe" in Roger R. Briggs' Journey to Civilization tells why scientists feel pretty confident (though, of course, nothing in science is ever perfectly certain).
That, is Webb access.
"Okay, so something swelled up and popped like 13 billion years ago, but what was it and what made it swell up like that in the first place? Why is that the beginning? Do we even know what popped? Maybe that was the end of whatever it was. Fucking science."
I don't know if you're being sarcastic, but one of the theories relating to the "Big Bang" is that the universe will eventually stop expanding, will then contract until it reaches the point of complete collapse into one infinitesimal spot, a Big Crunch...which will then lead to another Big Bang. Theories are always being modified and contested, but under this theory there have been many Big Bangs and Big Crunches over the infinity of "time." (This is in accord with the Hindu belief that existence goes through unending cycles of creation and destruction. Hindus also believe there are many universes, just as many scientists theorize there are alternative universes.)
"— especially our children — "
Pedo Pete, always thinking of the children.
"But if we assume that what we observe locally today is true everywhere and has been true throughout the past (which is the default cosmological assumption: we do not live in a “special” place and time, different from other places and times)"
Those are not just arbitrary assumptions. Way back in the 1920s, the German mathematician Emily Noether showed that if there is conservation of energy, then the laws of physics are the same throughout time (and vice versa). Similarly, if there is conservation of momentum, the laws of physics are the same everywhere in the universe (and vice versa). All observations indicate those conservations are true. Which is why they are taught in any introductory physics course.
---"I have seen the first images and they are spectacular," deputy project scientist Dr Amber Straughn said of Tuesday's further release.
Teri Hatcher could not be reached for comment.
I will be around for eighty plus years. That's better than a mayfly, worse than a sequoia but not much of 13.8 billion years. I suppose we should be grateful that it hasn't been the worse infinitesimal fraction available. Times were probably worse during the Jurassic Period and all those Oxford and Heidelberg graduates, class of 1913, were in for a nasty surprise.....I'm of mixed feelings about this life thing. When you consider the enormity of time and space, it's certainly been a rare and lucky break that we got to experience and appreciate it. On the other hand, when you consider the enormity of time and space, we didn't get to experience and appreciate much of it. There was a long line, and the ride was over too quick.
There are plenty of things that are beyond our capacity. Sending the Webb telescope out on its mission on time and under budget was very clearly beyond our demonstrated capacity.
"We can do anything."
'Count votes?'
Convict Trump?
I need to get out more.
My God. Just like JFK. All the bad publicity will be behind him now.
And the light that you are seeing... has been travelling for over 13 billion years
I've often had a thought related to this statement: when looking up at stars, what I am 'seeing' are photons which have been travelling unimpeded for perhaps billions of years, only to have been stopped by my retinas and transformed into electrical signals in my brain. That which was created at (or near) the beginning of the universe has been on an eons-long journey to my eye, and that journey is now ended in my perception.
It makes God's creation seem meaningless.
I'm a big believer in the God of the Bible and have found nothing science proves to be in conflict with that book or my faith. Certainly life on Earth and all He created is not meaningless. To the contrary, one reaction might be "God made all this just for us?" Or, perhaps God created other planets to have a variety of life to engage with. What we don't know we don't know.
rhhardin said...
My morse code thoughts as a 12 year old have already made it to over 700 star systems.
That may seem like a large distance, but think of it this way:
Man-made radio wave were first 'sent out' around 1900, meaning they have been traveling now for ~120 years. But our galaxy is 100,000 light-years across, so those first radio waves have only traveled 1/833 of the Milky Way's diameter to date.
Now consider that the average distance between galaxies is somewhere in the ballpark of 10 to 100 larger than the size of galaxies, those radio waves will take >1 million years to reach an average-distanced 'next' galaxy. And then realize that there are billions of galaxies beyond us and our next-door neighbor galaxies.
Makes you feel kinda small...
Blogger Roger Sweeny said..."@Original Mike - The images are manipulated. Infrared is shortened to visible light. Contrast is heightened. Color is added to make them aesthetically pleasing."
Thanks, Roger. I'm well aware of how it works. Though I would like a description of exactly how this image was processed. Will try and find the time to go looking for it later.
"That includes the word "know," which denotes certainty."
You couldn't do science burdened with that definition of "know".
I've just explained how impossible space travel is from one solar system to another is. But if someone wants to close their eyes and wish really, really hard, maybe it could still happen.
If you wish upon a star. Makes no difference who you are..
@iowan 10:52
I drew no conclusions. Just observations. I do not presume to know what you find meaningful and I'd appreciate if you made no similar presumptions about me.
Maybe the end is the beginning is the end.
If the word “know” means “certainly”, it means nothing. There’s always nonzero uncertainty.
“Know” means “not contradicted by any currently available evidence, but subject to revision should we find new evidence”.
All available evidence today says 13.8 billion years to most cosmologists, though some interpret it differently. If they can find new evidence or persuasive contradictions within existing evidence, what we know may change.
"Me, I'm a G.H. Pember gapper. Old universe that had a beginning and the force behind it, of course, was God."
As am I.
I find it interesting that the Bible speaks of creation as a stretching out of the heavens as in Zech 12:1 "...Thus declares Jehovah, who stretches forth the heavens and lays the foundation of the earth and forms the spirit of man within him,"
Stretching forth the heavens is the perfect description based on what we know scientifically. (Of course, the important part of the verse is man created as a vessel with a spirit.)
"The age of has not been tested to any degree of certainty."
Yeah, that's not right.
I'm sure you're not going to be satisfied with that. And to be fair, understanding it (which I don't claim to have mastered yet, and I've spent a lot of time at it) requires a great deal of study.
And that light that you are seeing on one of those little specks has been travelling for over 13 billion years.
Nope. That light that I'm seeing has been traveling for less than the blink of an eye, from my computer monitor to my eye. It represents light captured by the JWST that had been traveling for over 13 billion years.
For those who don’t understand why we ask “they know?” The age of the Universe is a scientific belief based on a hypothesis. If you don’t understand this basic component of the scientific method, then I doubt an explanation of error in models and assumptions will help you. I recommend the Mike Rowe podcast episode 185 with Michelle Thaller as they discuss Hubble’s photo of this same spot in space, just as a primer.
For those who don’t understand why we ask “they know?” The age of the Universe is a scientific belief based on a hypothesis.
What I KNOW is that a couple of you are rather condescending. And not in a good way.
And "belief based on a hypothesis" only proves the point about it not being "known."
’Sending the Webb telescope out on its mission on time and under budget was very clearly beyond our demonstrated capacity.’
Especially with Ball Aerospace as the principal optical contractor.
I’ve spent several decades consulting to the satellite industry in economics (and still do a little side work to this day) and was hired by NASA to do an independent economic analysis of JWST during its preliminary design review. At the time, the current best estimate was about $4.5B. My agency customer literally dragged me out of the room by my arm when I said the quiet part out loud in front of an assistant administrator. My number was $10.2B and I was right. In a follow up email I also told the guy to ‘fuck off’. I no longer consult to NASA or Ball Aerospace, but my few remaining customers love me. I’m a charming guy…
I don't think there will ever be faster than light travel, so if we are going to reach the stars, we will have to find a way to suspend our lives for at least 100-200 years, or do it in generation ships.
I am probably one of the few people who actually believes it likely humans are alone in this galaxy and the nearby ones.
Joe Biden saw all this years ago, and then he watched FDR on the television.
Since Ptolemy and geocentrism were debunked by Galileo et al., the human race has had quite a humbling succession of discoveries that have moved us ever farther away from the center of existence, our puny concerns and infinitesimal lives ever more trivialized. I take a different view. I reason backwards from an axiom: the real miraculousness of human consciousness, its capacity for joy, play, knowledge, and ever greater growth, is such that nobody should accept the meaninglessness of human life. Once you buy into that axiom, an infinite set of possibilities opens up.
Maybe you don't like my axiom. That's your choice. I like my axiom. When you philosophize, don't start with a blank sheet of paper. Start with an axiom that can give your life meaning and purpose. If you start with a blank sheet, you're almost certain to end up with a blank sheet.
’Though I would like a description of exactly how this image was processed.’
For the Stephan’s Quintet image released this morning, from the mid-infrared instrument (MIRI): The color results from assigning different hues (colors) to each monochromatic (grayscale) image associated with an individual filter. In this case, the assigned colors are: Red: F1500W, Green: F1000W, and Blue: F770W.
Info for each image is available at webbtelescope.org.
I disagree with our hostess. Perhaps for the only time, I believe that Biden spoke appropriately and well. The deep field images of SMACS0723 are simply spectacular revealing thousands or more distant galaxies in a sky field the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length. Imagine the images from the next grain of sand over. And the grain after that.
America may be infinitesimal in size by comparison to the universe, but in our human world, it is a giant beacon of freedom and economic success where even the least of us can see these 20 megapixel images on their Obama phones. Only America has the disposable income to fund hardcore basic science that puts our extraordinary existence in context. It is a massive achievement that even the lefties haven't managed to fuck up.
- Krumhorn
I like Ampersand's axiom very much, and it supports my thought that Biden spoke correctly and well.
- Krumhorn
---Teri Hatcher could not be reached for comment.
Not a striking redheaded astrophysicist, but she does pretty well in the chemistry department.
I, for one, appreciate that the Webb telescope already got a mirror dinged by a micrometeorite and yet still performs. Planning for expected problems is a good thing.
https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/06/08/webb-engineered-to-endure-micrometeoroid-impacts/
If the universe is 13.8 billion light years and we can see all the way back to 13 billion, does that mean we are only 0.8 billion light years from the edge?
Blogger rhhardin said..."My morse code thoughts as a 12 year old have already made it to over 700 star systems."
*******************
Not even close---unless you broadcast your morse code signals using an extremely powerful transmitter, it would have weakened to the point where it would be indistinguishable from the background "noise" in space.
https://www.quora.com/How-far-do-radio-signals-travel-into-space-before-they-degrade-to-a-degree-beyond-being-possible-to-be-detected?share=1
So,,,,despite the charming idea, residents on planets circling Proxima Centauri did not wake up one day 65 years ago to the theme from "I Love Lucy".
Two opposing thoughts struck me.
1 - man earth is so insignificant in the vastness of space and time.
2 - it’s amazing and I feel grateful there is only one of me in the entire universe.
Uticn said...
If the universe is 13.8 billion light years and we can see all the way back to 13 billion, does that mean we are only 0.8 billion light years from the edge?
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Imagine we live on a ball, and we have no height, only length and width. The surface of the ball is our entire universe.
Imagine it’s 13.8 inches around the ball to the farthest point. Now imagine we can see 13 inches of that.
In any direction we look, we can see 13 inches. There’s no edge near us, because there’s no edge at all.
’…does that mean we are only 0.8 billion light years from the edge?’
The Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) received data within 400,000 light years of ‘the edge’, but the instrumentation and processing were relatively crude, given its1989 launch date.
I'm with you Yancey on alone in near space
I don't know if you're being sarcastic, but one of the theories relating to the "Big Bang" is that the universe will eventually stop expanding, will then contract until it reaches the point of complete collapse into one infinitesimal spot, a Big Crunch...which will then lead to another Big Bang. Theories are always being modified and contested, but under this theory there have been many Big Bangs and Big Crunches over the infinity of "time." (This is in accord with the Hindu belief that existence goes through unending cycles of creation and destruction. Hindus also believe there are many universes, just as many scientists theorize there are alternative universes.)
Lots of physicists have embraced this variant on the Big Bang (infinitely many collapsing and repeating Big Bangs) — the late John Archibald Wheeler is a prominent example — but the problem with endorsing it now in the 21st century is that little finding by WMAP (noted up-thread) that the universe is “slate flat” in shape. If gravity is to eventually halt the expansion of the universe, then our cosmos must have a positive (5-dimensional) curvature — not negative — and not zero (meaning flat curvature).
The issue of “black energy” (73% of the universe — another finding of WMAP) complicates this situation, because how the universal expansion will change over time due to that “black” factor is presently unknown, but barring complications from that avenue, our “flat” universe ain't about to eventually collapse — it will just continue expanding (ever more slowly, but expanding nonetheless) forever.
effinayright said...
Blogger rhhardin said..."My morse code thoughts as a 12 year old have already made it to over 700 star systems."
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Not even close---unless you broadcast your morse code signals using an extremely powerful transmitter, it would have weakened to the point where it would be indistinguishable from the background "noise" in space.
That quora answer does not take into account the size of the receiving antenna. The larger the antenna the weaker the signal it can detect, even if that signal is weaker than the background noise.
That's because as you increase the size you increase the number of photons you collect, both signal and noise. However the photons of the noise are random, so they tend to cancel each other out. The photons from the signal are correlated, so they reinforce each other.
The cool thing about faster-than-light travel is not that you can go places no-one has ever gone before (yawn) but that it would also enable you to travel backward in time. So I could zip to Proxima Centauri, take a quick look around (meh), and then zip back to earth, arriving before I left. Then I could answer the really interesting question, what happens if the returned me kills the original me before I left? I might just disappear, but I think it’s more likely that the contradiction causes the entire universe to self-destruct. It might seem selfish, but if I have to go sometime, I think that would be a cool way to exit; at least I wouldn’t feel like I was going to miss out on anything.
"These images are going to remind the world that America can do big things, and remind the American people — especially our children — that there's nothing beyond our capacity"
Once the diversity and climate change advocates get their way, our children will be living like primitives. That telescope will be transmitting its imagery to the planet of the apes.
"President Biden dragged the profound down to earth, to rah-rah-America-is-great politics:"
Meadehouse needs to unbunch it's pantaloons. IMHO.
It's the original wee little split of a split of a split of a split of a ... and so on split second that is the place for new science, v re this post.
When Meadehouse gets on its soap box it's always cool. When it gets on it's science soap box it's the coolest.
IMHO.
P.S. The only way Meadehouse would know about CMB would be if a D had said something about it such that Meadehouse could be upset about what was said. Sans that, Meadehouse is now deeply (ha) into to this "profound" look back thirteen billion years. If news is new to ya, it's new news. Duh. Or put differently, if science happens and you can't turn it into an attack of your readers' enemies, did it really happen? Brains are interesting.
This blog is the best!!
Even though the Universe is thought to be just 14 billion years old, its diameter is believed to extend 92 billion light years.
Here's why:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBr4GkRnY04
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEy7ujp6Dng
The reasoning is tricky, but you'll still likely get the drift.
And don't forget, we are detecting light that traveled in one direction, toward us. If astronomers exist beyond (on the backside of )what we are now seeing and are looking at the same objects, they are much farther from us than 13.8 billion light-years away.
I'm a geezer.
One thing I've decided regarding my eventual personal extinction is how highly unlikely other sentient beings exist on planets within quadrillions of miles from Earth.
So I consider myself extraordinarily lucky to have lived at all.
So should you all.
If you had a choice, which would you be: a lifeless but billion-year-old sun, or a human being?
Dylan Thomas should have mulled that over before raging against the dying of the light.
We know the age of the observable universe better than we know most things in science Is it possible that there's a big boo-boo in the hypothesis and the age is a lot different? Of course it's possible. Is it possible that the earth is 6,000 years old and uranium/lead ratios, etc. were arranged so that it looks 4.5 billion years old? Yeah, it's possible. Doesn't seem likely, but it's possible.
"Me, I'm a G.H. Pember gapper. Old universe that had a beginning and the force behind it, of course, was God"
Okay. I get it, the Bible explains how we and Earth came to exist. Sure, it's not meant to be taken literally. At first it was meant to be taken literally, but sneaky scientists jabbering about their findings have required a less literal interpretation nowadays. I understand that. And don't forget that those dopey scientists admit that they can't definitively figure out where stuff came from before we had the stuff that we now know about, stuff like us. So obviously, as the scientists must admit, they don't have the answers re the original origin. They just hand wave and say that the origin is not yet understood.
But, if you say that the big guy upstairs made everything, you do understand the origin, unlike those dopey scientists.
Where did the big guy upstairs originate from? He just always was. Always was. Nothing hand wavy about that answer.
P.S. I never took a gap year, and I thought that kids that did that shit were POS loser snowflakes that should STFU and get to work. OTOH, if the big guy upstairs is pro maxin relaxin for a gap, maybe I'm being too judgmental.
IDK.
Sure, it's not meant to be taken literally. At first it was meant to be taken literally,
Let's Assume, for the sake of argument.. That You are GOD.
IF you're writing a book, for 12 century BC mideasterners; How much DETAILED Cosmology would You put in?
I can’t help your poor reading comprehension either, Mark.
Wouldn't it be awesome if we discovered that we're not alone in the Universe?
And wouldn't it be awesome to discover that we are?
Either way, try to enjoy your ride.
“Let's Assume, for the sake of argument.. That You are GOD.”
My first task would be to introduce the reverse-miracle.
Sure everybody likes it when an ill person gets better, and we love potato chips that look like little baby hey zeus. Miracles are cool. I will keep those.
But I’d also have reverse-miracles. Some nut is murdering a bunch of people = they burst into flame (but their flames don’t damage any property nearby.) Or, slow cars in the left lane on the highway = these cars elevate above the road and are moved to the far right lane where they are gently and safely put back on the road surface. Or, you’re washing your car and someone says that you are going to make it rain, or they say that their car is next = that person gets nose hair that grows a quarter inch per day for a week. Really there’d be a punishment for all so-called dad jokes. And so on. I’ll have miracles that punish.
"...And since we know the Universe is 13.8 billion years old..."?
I'm sorry but it's a 'Theory'! As we get more information it will be proven correct or false.
My view is that the Universe is older and no one knows for sure either way.
But keep on discovering the photos are spectacular!
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