||| FROM NASA |||
NASA today released this first image from the new James Webb Space Telescope. Words will not suffice…
Related Posts
6 Comments
Comments are closed.
||| FROM NASA |||
NASA today released this first image from the new James Webb Space Telescope. Words will not suffice…
Comments are closed.
I can barely stretch my mind around the reality that the source of these points of light is so far away some of the light captured left its galaxy about 13.8 Billion years ago. (Just after the Big Bang)— over 9 Billion years before Earth existed! (Our planet is only~4.5 Billion years old — or 6000 years old if your trusted source of history is Genesis.)
Um… well I think SOME words would suffice. What are we looking at, exactly? What is its purpose?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/12/james-webb-space-telescope-photos-explanation/
What the Post explanation doesn’t tell you is that the bright white blobs in the foreground form a massive cluster of galaxies that are, by virtue of all that mass (which includes a huge amount of invisible dark matter), warping space time so much that the orange-colored galaxies in the background are flattened out and forming “Einstein rings.” These background galaxies were less than a billion years old when they emitted the light that reached the Webb Telescope. And that light had been stretched so much by the expansion of the Universe in the intervening eons that it was no longer visible to the naked eye. It had to be detected by infrared cameras.. What you see on the screen is a “colorized” conversion of the infrared Webb image made so that our eyes can see it and delight.
“The stars, like dust, encircle me
In living mists of light;
And all of space I seem to see
In one vast burst of sight”
~Isaac Asimov
How about these words, Sadie? Sublime, stupendous, mind-boggling, staggering, magnificent, formidable, wondrous and the most awesome thing my eyes have viewed in 81 years (except for the birth of my two daughters).