This appeared last week:
Were the decades and billions spent on James Webb telescope worth it?
Thankfully, we have people who can conceive an instrument that records infinitesimal waves of energy emitted around the time the Earth was formed.
David Von Drehle
Jan 1, 2023 – 12.00am
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” So says Hamlet to his school chum after a chilling encounter with a ghost. The line went through my mind as I looked at the first image released by NASA from the James Webb Space Telescope, the marvel of engineering and audacity recently parked and unfolded in an orbit roughly 1 million miles from home.
Operating so far away gives the Webb supersensitivity to infrared light that cannot be seen by the human eye. It can see much, much farther than the low-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. And because light travels at a constant speed, seeing farther in distance is the same as looking more deeply back in time.
The image is a picture from 4.6 billion years ago. This is only the first of many mind-boggling concepts contained in the spellbinding frame. A pitch-black background is speckled with thousands of distinct lights, some starlike in their brilliance, others smudgy, and still others smaller than pinpoints.
All these distinct lights are contained in a tiny speck of space. How tiny? Scientists proposed this way of envisioning: take a single grain of sand, hold it out at arm’s length and compare it to your entire field of vision. That is the speck of space Webb looked at to acquire its first observation.
Those thousands of lights in that speck of space are not individual stars like our sun. They are entire galaxies. The one galaxy we know best, our own Milky Way, contains anywhere from 100 billion to 400 billion stars.
And here it might be helpful to spend a moment with the concept of a billion.
The word gets tossed around a lot, but the scale of it is not easily grasped. If you spent eight solid hours each day counting off the seconds, every day of the year without a break, starting at age five, you would need to live almost to age 100 to reach 1 billion. In 100 such lifetimes, a person might count the stars of this single galaxy – one of thousands in a speck of the universe.
And in the background, deep in time, are galaxies and more galaxies and more galaxies.
Thankfully, some people are better able to absorb such vastness, to get their heads around it and to think on such a scale, than I am. Their philosophies (as Hamlet might put it) are sufficient to conceive an instrument that records infinitesimal waves of energy emitted about the time the Earth was formed, to deploy that instrument at a position in space four times farther than the moon and thus to take a picture of thousands of galaxies containing trillions of stars.
More here:
Here is a link to some great images!
https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/webb-telescope-image-galleries-from-nasa
More info is here:
https://jwst.nasa.gov/index.html
My view is that while some my say we could use these funds to feed to poor etc. I think we should look both in and out to be fully human and fully engaged and so should both feed the poor and explore the cosmos.
To me it is not a one or the other choice – we must do both!
David.
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