As you may have heard The James Webb Space Telescope will be releasing "data from its first five targets" on Tuesday. I'm no astronomer but here's what I've gathered about what that means, and what we'll see.
Four of the five sets of data will come in the form of pictures of our universe that will give us both resolution and wavelengths we've never seen before.
Resolution means...just more pixels per unit of sky.
Wavelengths means kinds of light that we haven't been able to see.
The other data set will be the spectrum of the atmosphere of WASP-96b, a gas giant about half the size of Jupiter that's around 1000 light years away. Webb promises to be by far our best tool for getting data on the atmospheres of exoplanets, which will be a tremendous win.
As for the four images...here are our targets. Three of these are going to be absolutely stunningly beautiful visually, the other one is going to be the kind of picture that nestles into your mind and creates a weight that will never leave you.
This is the Southern Ring Nebula. It's a planetary nebula...gas thrown off by a red giant at the end of its life. This is a well-studied nebula, which is always a good early target as it will allow scientists to see now new data fits into the old.
Second we have the Carina Nebula, a different sort of nebula...a cloud of gas and dust giving birth to NEW stars. It's one of the largest nebulas in the sky and it contains a variety of stars at different stages of formation. It's also just VERY CHARISMATIC.
Zooming way out, this is Stephan's Quintet...five galaxies packed so close together you'd think they were photoshopped. Two of these galaxies are actively colliding! Again, a well-studied patch of the sky that contains TONS of opportunities for new insight.
And then last, proof that they're JUST GOING FOR IT, it's SMACS 0723. We started quite close, just 1000 light years away, now we are going to look, oh, y'know, 13 or 14 BILLION light years away. And the way we are doing it is MADNESS.
The promise of Webb has always been to see farther away (and thus farther back in time) than we have ever seen, and that's what this is about. SMACS 0723 is a galaxy cluster so massive that light /bends/ around it. And what is a telescope but a tool for bending light?
This gravitation distortion allows us to use this galaxy cluster as a lens. In effect, we are pointing the world's best man-made telescope at the universe's best natural telescope.
We're going to see what's on the other side of that, which is, very nearly...the beginning.
So, get hyped. This is one of the coolest things humanity has ever done and the mission is just getting started.
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I want to tell you a story that has made me kinda hopeless about Twitter's ability to affect positive things happening, and it starts with this tweet from Hillary Clinton.
It was (and I understand why) widely mocked. The graph is confusing and bad, especially the part where it flattens out in 2030 (which is when most of the provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest climate change bill in the history of Earth, expires.)
Some of the people making fun of the tweet were like "How do I vote for Target" which is a good joke. But the majority of the popular tweets about it were like "This is the problem with Democrats, they will only ever be just a little better than Republicans."
FYI Charlotte the stingray is not pregnant with shark rays (unfortunately impossible) but she is also not pregnant with clones of herself (also impossible) it's much weirder than that.
Charlotte the stingray procreates sexually, which means she isn't set up to create clones. Her egg cells have half of her genome with a random mix of genes from her father and mother.
Usually that would get fertilized with sperm with half of another stingray's genome.
Charlotte can't just not use an egg cell to make babies. She has to. So an evolutionary hack developed where some animals can fertlize their own eggs. In the case of sharks and rays, this is done with a by product of meiosis called a "polar body" that is usually discarded.
Here's the story of how I kinda bought 10% of an amazing new word game...for charity.
A few months ago, I saw a TikTok about a word game called "Gubbins" that was being produced by a small indie game studio in Australia (@folly_studio) and I messaged the people creating it.
I got early access to the game and absolutely loved it. It's fun, simple, fast, clever, and most of all ABSOLUTELY DELIGHTFUL. It's just a little piece of art that is part of my daily life now.
We got on the phone and they talked about how FREAKING HARD it is to do anything interesting in the mobile game space and how they were having a difficult financial time making it to the finish line.
Massively under-reported science story because there's so much going on right now but...it turns out that we might have figured out what's causing this very scary spike.
Quick thread, on how WE'VE BEEN ACCIDENTALLY GEOENGINEERING FOR DECADES...but then we stopped:
So, geoengineering (or climate engineering) is when you intentionally do stuff to change the climate of the Earth. When you accidentally do stuff to change the climate of the Earth, that's just called "The last 100 years."
We've been doing a lot of accidental geoengineering.
The big bit is all of the CO2 in the atmosphere, which heats things up a lot. But we also do other stuff, like for example releasing tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, which we do by burning dirty fuels like coal and fuel oil.
It's really a shame that the IceCube neutrino observatory galaxy map was released on the same day as the gravitational wave data because they're both entirely new ways to observe our universe and I feel like it didn't get the press it deserved!
Like, it's one thing to use pulsars in the Milky Way as a galaxy-sized gravitational wave detector. But it's another thing to actually build a neutrino telescope by lowering thousands of detectors into a square kilometer of perfectly clear, ancient Antarctic ice.
100 trillion neutrinos pass through you every second never hitting anything...but very rarely they do hit an atom, creating a tiny spark of light! But what does it matter when there isn't a huge volume of transparent material in perfect darkness OH WAIT THERE IS!!!