James Webb telescope

The launch went perfect and he’s on its way.

6 Likes

looks cool

Very exciting, been reading about this project for decades. Planet hunting telescope.

1 Like

It’s depressing to know we’ll all be dead before we get to the Expanse level stuff.

That’s why I prefer to be a psychonaut.

1 Like

Hopefully it won’t see through cloaking devices.

image

1 Like

I had this weird dream that the James Webb telescope was made for interstellar travel…

I am most excited about how it can “look back into time” to when the universe was just a couple hundred million years old. Maybe it will help answer questions around dark matter or energy.

It can’t look back in time.

Basically the speed of light says that if you saw some heavenly object, it took light x number of light years to get here, so if you saw some heavenly object the speed of light says you are looking at what they look like x light years ago.

But experimentally it was shown that gravity can bend light, so it makes one wonder how would we truly know how far some star or galaxy is? The light to us could have taken a much longer path to us than its actual distance because perhaps its light got bent by other stars between us and the object.

It also means there could be objects we can’t see because its light can’t reach us due to gravity lensing.

What I mean is that the telescope can look at the light that was emitted some hundred of millions of years after the universe was created. That light then traveled billions of years to hit the telescope. That is what I mean by “looking back into time”. Basically, you are looking at what happened billions of years ago.

There are also objects we cannot see because the objects are (now) traveling faster away from us than the speed of light. But, you will ask, nothing can go faster than light, right? Yes, but the space of the universe is expanding and the expansion does not count as space traveled.

In some 100 billion years we will not be able to see any other galaxies in the night’s sky, because they will have exited the light horizon.

1 Like

Yeah, I think that your meaning was totally clear there.

Also, the first images have already started coming through: (joke, obviously, before TL tells me that it won’t start collecting images for 6 months :upside_down_face: )

rbf

3 Likes

The images are starting to pour in. Can’t see any space Nazis… yet.

image

Anyway, very cool! Space looks a lot like an eye.

2 Likes

UNKNOWN: Cosmic Time Machine | Official Trailer | Netflix - YouTube

Way cool. Way. Cool.

Everything we know about space is just about fuck all

2 Likes

Oh right, so I can stay up late tonight, then?

1 Like

Only if you promise to do the washing up.

In ten billion years the sun will explode, so we will have our own problems way before the galaxy spins off into oblivion. Typical, innit!

1 Like

Oh I’ll think we’ll all be gone by then. Just gotta fold a bit of time space and surf a gravity wave through it.

1 Like

Humans are on the way out. Developing writing was our first mistake. Steam engines the next. Now the internet is slowly turning us into a homogenous lump of asexual narcissists. We will choke or starve to death before long. Then the creatures that live for thousands of years (coral polyps, sponges etc) will get back into business.

It’s odd really that the earth created something so self harming as Homo Sapiens. It was doing so well, turning single cell organisms into complex cells. Creating mitochondria, cytoplasm etc. Then over time the earth made us. Why? We are the species equivalent of eating a kebab after ten pints.

What if the public data from Forumosa gets data scraped and AIs import our perceived personalities?

Don’t worry. mine will go bankrupt on repairing shit cars and buying cheap computer hardware. Go hard, my artificial dudes!

That’s how the light gets in

Oh, I was in such a hurry to post my little lyrical reference I didn’t read the article. Scumbag Brain filled in the telescope name, should actually be Himalayan Chandra Telescope.

Anyways, doesn’t need a new thread

1 Like