December 26, 2021
A "Keyhole into the Past." Dennis Overbye & Joey Roulette of the New York Times: "The dreams and work of a generation of astronomers headed for an orbit around the sun on Saturday in the form of the biggest and most expensive space-based observatory ever built. The James Webb Space Telescope, a joint effort of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, lifted off from a spaceport near the Equator in Kourou, French Guiana, a teetering pillar of fire and smoke embarking on a million-mile trip to the morning of time.... The telescope, named for the NASA administrator who led the space agency through the early years of the Apollo program, is designed to see farther in space and further back in time than the vaunted Hubble Space Telescope. Its primary light gathering mirror is 21 feet across, about three times bigger than Hubble, and seven times more sensitive.... The Webb's mission is to seek out the earliest, most distant stars and galaxies, which appeared 13.7 billion years ago, burning their way out of a fog leftover from the Big Bang (which occurred 13.8 billion years ago). Astronomers watching the launch remotely from all over the world, many Zooming together in their pajamas, were jubilant....The Webb will examine all of cosmic history, billions of years of it, astronomers say -- from the first stars to life in the solar system. This week, the NASA administrator Bill Nelson called the telescope a 'keyhole into the past.'" The Guardian's report is here. ~~~
~~~ Marie: There are some things I take on faith, as it turns out, when I don't understand them. How can a camera take pictures of something that happened billions of years ago in a galaxy far, far away when I can't take pictures of my grandparents on a picnic in 1913? Or can I?
Alexandra Jaffe of the AP: "President Joe Biden marked his first Christmas in office by making calls to military service members stationed around the world, offering them holiday wishes and gratitude for their service and sacrifice for the nation. Joined by his wife, Jill, and their new puppy, Commander, the president on Saturday spoke via video to service members representing the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Space Force and Coast Guard, stationed at bases in Qatar, Romania, Bahrain and the U.S." Here's video. ~~~
~~~ There's Always a Schmuck. Or a Schmeck. Joe DePaulo of Mediaite: "The man who told President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden 'Let's go Brandon' during a Christmas phone call claims he was just joking and that he's been receiving threats. Speaking to The Oregonian on Saturday, the man -- Jared Schmeck, from Central Point, OR -- said that although he believes Biden '[could] be doing a better job,' he did not intend any 'disrepect.'... 'He seems likes he's a cordial guy. There's no animosity or anything like that. It was merely just an innocent jest to also express my God-given right to express my frustrations in a joking manner... I love him just like I love any other brother or sister.' 'Let's go Brandon' has become a popular substitute among conservatives for 'Fuck Joe Biden.'" Mediaite's original story on Schmeck is here. Tommy Christopher reports that Biden took the remark in stride.
Guardian: "Despite surging Omicron cases of the coronavirus in the US, Joe and Jill Biden made an unannounced joint visit to a children's hospital in Washington DC on Christmas Eve. The US president's visit to Children's National Hospital was a surprise for patients and staff, the White House reported, and was believed to be the first visit to the institution by a sitting president.... Pictures on Friday showed the first couple with young patients, everyone wearing face masks to help prevent the spread of Covid-19."
Michael Grynbaum of the New York Times: "A New York trial court judge has upheld his order preventing The New York Times from publishing documents prepared by a lawyer for the conservative group Project Veritas, in a move that alarmed First Amendment advocates concerned about judicial intrusion into journalistic practices. In a ruling made public on Friday, the judge, Justice Charles D. Wood of State Supreme Court in Westchester County, went further: He ordered The Times to immediately turn over any physical copies of the Project Veritas documents in question, and to destroy any electronic copies in the newspaper's possession. The Times said it would seek a stay of the ruling and was planning to appeal it." The Guardian's story is here. ~~~
~~~ New York Times Editors: "The Times, like any other news organization, makes ethical judgments daily about whether to disclose secret information from governments, corporations and others in the news. But the First Amendment is meant to leave those ethical decisions to journalists, not to courts. The only potential exception is information so sensitive -- say, planned troop movements during a war -- that its publication could pose a grave threat to American lives or national security. Project Veritas's legal memos are not a matter of national security.... Justice Wood has taken it upon himself to decide what The Times can and cannot report on. That's not how the First Amendment is supposed to work.
The New York Times' live updates for Covid-19 developments Saturday are here.
** South Africa. Marilyn Berger of the New York Times: "Desmond M. Tutu, the cleric who used his pulpit and spirited oratory to help bring down apartheid in South Africa and then became the leading advocate of peaceful reconciliation under Black majority rule, died on Sunday in Cape Town. He was 90."
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Reader Comments (11)
Hi Marie! You could take a photo of your grandparents enjoying their picnic if they were situated 118 light years away from earth. A light year is the distance light travels in a year - nearly 6 trillion miles, no short hop. The light bouncing off them would take 118 years to reach your camera, or your eyes, and with a suitable "light bucket" telescope (to collect the very few photons of light that would reach you), you could see them. However, since your grand parents were only a few (maybe hundreds) miles away, the light traveled to where you are now almost instantaneously. The way we, all of us, can look so far back in time is by looking at objects in the sky that are huge distances away from us here on earth. When we look at the sun (through appropriate filters), we are looking back in time about 8 1/2 minutes. Our second closest star Proxima Centauri takes us back about 4 1/4 years in time The more distant the star, the galaxy or the gas cloud is from us, the longer it takes the light to reach us, so we are "seeing" or "looking" back in time when we see the object in our cameras and telescopes here on, or close to, earth. Perhaps an analogy can be made with thunder and lightning. Electrons shoot through the air and we see the lightning almost instantaneously, but hear the thunder seconds later, so we are "hearing" back in time because sound travels so much more slowly than light. We know that when we hear thunder, it is too late to see the lightning that caused that crack, because the action is in the past. It's fascinating that we know that some of the systems we currently study in space no longer exist, at all or as we see them, because they have collapsed or blown up.
We can currently see back to close to the Big Bang, and Webb will take us closer still, hopefully to nascent stars and before the formation of galaxies. So exciting. How fortunate we are to live in such times.
I hope this helps, and is not just more confusing! Merry Christmas to you and your wonderful readers, and may we all have a better 2022.
Gloria,
Thanks for such a wonderful explanation. Somehow it feels calming to realize that all our here and now issues are only a few photons worth going out to the cosmos.
@Gloria: Yes, thank you so much for your excellent explanation. This is really something I've never understood, yet have "known" about (sort of) for decades. So I'm deeply appreciative. I'm sure many others are, too. Also, your arithmetic sucks: 1913 was 108 years ago, not 118. And, no, that doesn't matter a whit to your very clear explanation. (And definitely not a criticism; I think it's funny.)
Dates may suck but holy cow! Gloria, you is one smart cookie and we thank you.
God, by the way is delighted with this information, Just sent down a wee note this morning affirming said data which in time, he hopes, will get him off the hook and one of these light years will eliminate the BIG LIE IN the Sky.
Some other thoughts on that picnic photo:
-- to maintain a synchronized video of that scene, you'd have to be moving away from it in our expanding universe (and, it is moving away from you). The Hubble expansion rate is about 70 km/s/Mpc (where 1 Mpc = 106 parsec = 3.26 × 106 light-year).
-- those photons are not actually going "straight" because spacetime curves -- yet a lens can gather coherent image even after light travels the curve(s?)
-- It's easier to find a picture of your grandparents by rooting through your relatives' attics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buqtdpuZxvk
Thanks Gloria. It's hard stuff to understand. What I wanted to add was that each individual chemical element emitted by distant stars has its own unique electromagnetic frequency, or color when detected by the eye. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emission_spectrum. Super cool to me, is that if you have a soup of chemicals here on earth or in outer space these different frequencies can be used to deconstruct its chemical matrix to identify the individual chemical components. The range of detection in the instruments associated with the telescope far exceeds the capacity of our human eye. Science. It's a thing. Sorry I can't help with images of your grandparents...it'd be a sight to see.
Gloria,
One of my favorite things to do on a clear night is to look up and imagine what was going on here on our little blue ball in space when the light left the stars I’m looking at: the Titanic going down? Washington freezing at Valley Forge? Pangea starting to separate? In most cases, a universe without Fatty and his vicious horde.
We used to be able to “look” back much farther. Back when we all had analog TV’s, and television stations went off the air at night (remember “evening prayer” followed by a video of the Star Spangled Banner?), if you kept the set on, you would see tiny flashes, little white dots, dancing across your cathode ray tube. This would be cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang. Very cool.
But you’d have a hard time convincing many wingers that these events happened before 6,000 years ago. I had a neighbor once who was always going on about how stupid scientists were who believed that the universe was billions of years old. Don’t they know that god invented the whole thing a few thousand years ago? (Was it a school project for him? Hope he got an A). Weirdly, this guy (who was a lawyer) was a big astronomy buff. Don’t know how he kept it all straight.
Anyhoo, thanks for reminding us all to keep looking up.
Akhilleus says thanks for reminding us all to keep looking up.
Reminds me of a new Netflix flix: Don't Look Up.
Two astronomers go on a media tour to warn humankind of a
planet-killing comet hurtling toward Earth. The response from a
distracted world: Meh.
That response sounds about right. Thousands of you anti-science,
anti-vaccine people are going to die: Meh.
Down here in the Swamp State we're living in the world of "meh"! The state has set new records for cases in two successive days this week and that's pretty well been the governors reaction.
Ha - yes my arithmetic was always "order of magnitude" stuff. My undergrad degree was in pure mathematics, not applied! Lots of symbols; actual numbers, not so much, as you can see. I usually preface my numerical answers with "It's about ... "
Hey! We lost the War on Christmas ™ again??
You mean our intrepid, bloodthirsty, satan worshiping army of liberal zombies, secularists, commies, Jews, Muslims, Pastafarians, pro-choice and pro-democracy atheists haven’t succeeded in our lifelong mission of eradicating Christmas??
Oh noes!
But wait…
I never got my induction papers, never got my orders to report to the front, never got the secret handshake from other liberals that the War was back on. In fact,…I’ve NEVER gotten any of those things. Ever.
Could it be that the War on Christmas ™ is another phony baloney, bullshit scam by confederate liars to whip up yet more hatred and fury?
Imagine that!
The Fat Fascist loved to tell the droolers that he personally rescued Christmas from the evil clutches of Democrats. Funny how the current (real) president, a Democrat, actually goes to church, unlike the Fat Orange, criminal, traitor “savior” of right-wing Christmas.
Well Merry Christmas to all you haters and liars.
See you all next year. Maybe my orders will come through by then.