Let's chat. This is a spectrum of a galaxy, JADES-GS-z13-1-LA, a source I discovered last year as part of my big high-redshift catalog. This is the spectroscopic confirmation of it being at z = 13 from @JorisWitstok's recent paper ().

Wait, what's that? arxiv.org/abs/2408.16608
this spike here, that says "Ly-alpha at z = 13.05 +/- 0.01."

This is WILD. This is an "emission line" from hydrogen gas, where an electron drops down an energy level and gives off a photon of a specific ultraviolet energy.

This emission is seen often in *nearby* galaxies...

On Tuesday morning, NASA will release the first full color images from JWST. It's making me very emotional, tbh. Below are the targets of these images, shown from the ground, or from Hubble, or in an artist's rendition. Let's talk about these targets a little bit in advance! The first target is the Carina Nebula, an incredible assemblage of gas and young stars 8,500 light years away. This is a site of active star formation, and includes Eta Carinae, one of the most massive stars we know of in our galaxy, 100 - 150 times more massive than the Sun.

1) I want to talk about this photograph. It's the first photograph ever taken of the backside of the Moon, taken October 7th, 1959. So, just a week shy of sixty years ago. You're probably thinking "What a crummy image!" WELL LET ME TELL YOU HOW IT WAS MADE OK 2) So, this photograph was taken by the Soviet spacecraft Luna 3, which was launched a month after the Luna 2 spacecraft became the first man-made object to impact on the surface of the Moon. Luna 2 followed Luna 1, the first spacecraft to escape a geosynchronous Earth orbit