James Webb Space Telescope

The original photo, if shown, would not be visible to us.

So did the James Webb telescope succeed in its mission? Well, you can argue that it actually did too good of a job.

What do I mean by this? After the telescope came online, physicists needed to analyze the first images to explore the new capabilities of the telescope.

This led to a chaotic race as one scientist after another claimed to have discovered the oldest galaxy.

The problem is that according to our model, it would take a certain minimum amount of time for big bright galaxies to form because it involves a hierarchical process of small clouds of gas that condense over time, then stars coming together to form nascent galaxies.

Brightness is an indication of the number of stars or mass that a galaxy contains.

What the James Webb Telescope discovered is something that seemingly shouldn't exist.

Case in point, the Jadis GS Z14-0, the most distant galaxy ever discovered, so far is remarkably bright.

Same with the TRAPPIST-1 information.

If you go look at James Webb's telescope and see just the history of it, to see what paper trail they've already put together, you'll see that they've pointed that at Trappist-1 dozens of times over the last couple of years.

And they keep like just saying certain things about possible habitable planets in Trappist-1 and Trappist-6 and Trappist-1D and Trappist-1E.

I read a lot of articles about it and I just shake my head.

So instead of looking at just a small fraction, now we can look.

It's like James Webb telescope replacing Hubble telescope.

We have better technology now, and we can see a lot of things.

It's not like the galaxies were not there before.

So it is rising in diagnostic rates and medication, but that's because we're finally recognizing and treating people that have always been

It's like we've just put the James Webb telescope and gone, holy smokes, there's so much more stuff

out there.

Holy crap, there's so many of you.

You know, there are robotic missions on the surface of Mars looking for ancient signs of life.

We have the JWST Space Telescope that's searching for signs of life on other planets that exist outside of our

own solar

system.

The incident once again underscores the increasing challenges posed by aging space debris as thousands of large objects remain in orbit.

despite concerns experts emphasize the low risk the descent posed to humans with the likelihood of injury from such debris significantly lower than for example being struck by lightning in case you were wondering the chance of being struck by lightning in a lifetime is approximately one in fifteen thousand three hundred this translates to about two hundred and seventy people being struck by lightning in the u s each year NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has unveiled new insights into Jupiter's auroras, revealing them to be hundreds of times brighter than Earth's northern lights.

Captured in December 2023 using Webb's Near Infrared Camera, or NERC cam, these observations show that Jupiter's auroras are not only more intense, but also more dynamic than previously understood.

The auroras result from high energy particles colliding with atmospheric gases near the planet's magnetic poles, producing vibrant light displays.

Obviously, Event Horizon Telescope, you can look up those images.

But this is using James Webb to look at the material that's around the black hole.

and what's falling in.

And they were able to use the James Webb to see that things that are more metal rich are falling in.

And I need to be really clear because metals do not mean the same thing to an astronomer as it does to everyone else on the planet.

Have you come across this before?

All right.

I thought I was asking a thoughtful question.

that is the tradition the pacific lights belong to the long human habit of reading the universe's anomalies as letters addressed to us neptune was once a point of light that made no sense nobody laughed it out of the sky They did the mathematics, turned the telescope, and the new world was standing there.

There is one final layer of meaning in the story, and it lies in the very timing of its occurrence, in the fact that this wave of sightings arrived precisely while the human race was looking farther into the universe than at any moment in its history, in the summer of 2022. while pilots were counting lights over the pacific nasa was publishing the first images from the james webb space telescope galaxies born a few hundred million years after the big bang stellar nurseries glowing in infrared light the atmosphere of a distant world examined for the chemistry of life Billions of people looked at those pictures and felt correctly that humanity had reached a new threshold, the threshold of a species capable of seeing almost literally the beginning of everything.

It was a season of cosmic self-confidence, and it was in exactly that season that the same species received, over its own busiest ocean, a handful of lights it could not explain.

from trained observers flying its own machines, within a few kilometers of its own passengers.

And then, at the very peak of that far gaze, something else arrived.

a quiet reminder from the universe itself.

In the very weeks when the Pacific wave was unfolding, astronomers announced that the James Webb telescope had imaged the most distant individual star ever seen, a star whose light had traveled nearly 13 billion years to reach human eyes, a star that, by now, may long since have died, leaving only its light still traveling.

read side by side the two pieces of news from that one season carry a single lesson on one side a light from the edge of time detected by the finest instrument civilization has ever built confirming that the universe is knowable that light given enough patience and enough mathematics will tell its story on the other side lights over the pacific reported by some of the most credible ice civilization has ever trained dismissed into silence because the story they seemed to tell was not welcome two kinds of light treated by the same species in the same summer according to two different standards welcomed with headlines when they came from the beginning of time and buried in case-files when they came from a few kilometres off the wing that split not the lights themselves may be the most revealing observation of the entire season and it suggests that the two layers of that summer's story were never really separate a civilization learns to read the oldest light in the universe by practising patience honesty and mathematics on lesser puzzles first the far gaze and the near gaze are not two skills they are one skill pointed in different directions A species that refuses to look honestly at the lights over its own ocean has not yet finished learning the discipline that lets it read the light of the first galaxies.