Tuesday’s New York Times features remarkable and stunning new images taken from the James Webb Space Telescope, the ten-billion-dollar successor to the Hubble Telescope of a previous generation.
“So far it’s been eye candy from heaven,” Dennis Overbye writes. “The black vastness of space teeming with enigmatic, unfathomably distant blobs of light. Ghostly portraits of Neptune, Jupiter and other neighbors we thought we knew already.”
The piece mostly concentrates on the awe and wonder of scientists just digging into the early data and images.
What’s especially telling, though, is that the more the experts are learning from the Webb project, the less certain they seem to be of everything overall.
“Perhaps the biggest surprise from the Webb telescope so far involves events in the early millenniums of the universe,” Overbye notes. “Galaxies appear to have been forming, generating and nurturing stars faster than battle-tested cosmological models estimated.”
He then quotes Adam Riess, a Nobel Physics laureate and cosmologist from Johns Hopkins.
“How did galaxies get so old so fast?” he asks. In recent years, we read and hear quite a bit about “settled science” – a phrase used to put down or shut up anyone who dares challenge academic assertions that almost always contradict God’s account.
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