Good luck with bringing common sense (what ‘you would think’) to any of this. It’s hard, and the pros working in the field still disagree about it and quite often get it wrong. The rest of us don’t stand much of a chance.
In hindsight I assume the pointy ones are foreground stars ? It didn’t say anything in the blurb. I downloded the full res tiff and the detail is unbelievable.
The really BIG mindfuck for me is how can anyone look at images like these - with countless splashes of light, each a galaxy vastly older than our own, each filled with billions of stars, each of which might have a habitable planet somewhere within its unique ‘Goldilocks-zone’ - and imagine that intelligent life is unique to this one damp ball of rock!
That takes some aggressively-wilful anthropocentric exceptionalism - to the point of being a kind of ‘species-ist egomania’.
The ability of the JWST to analyse the atmospheres of exoplanets will be interesting in this respect.
This is all interesting stuff, not least for the range of values proposed:
Given the kind of eye-opening/mind-blowing work already achieved without it, it’s likely the next best thing to interstellar travel in our lifetimes - Ruby clouds and water behaving strangely: What we found when studying an exoplanet's dark side
All very “The Book of Strange, New Things”
It’s all a mind fuck. If entropy holds true for the universe then we are not even at 0.1% in that timeline, all white light and intelligent life ceases at o.1%, all light goes at 1% and the whole lot takes the remainder to become nothing. That number of years is larger than the number of atoms in the Universe, sod your grains of sand nonsense.
Now I am feeling sufficiently insignificant, well I was until I realise that sentient beings want to use their nano second of life to vote for Truss.
As noted earlier - just pick your model of Universe formation - if, indeed, there is any real need to accept formation as A Thing - and boggle-away!
Love it!
My fav bit so far was the White House briefing yesterday when the scientists were telling Biden they were now looking back in time 13.8bn years - the creationists must have been going fucking mad
The improvement in terms of resolution is extraordinary
And I recall how gobsmacked I was by Hubble’s images!
Make sure you click through the NASA page and look at the high res versions!
“Awe-inspiring” is in no way hyperbolic!
Reading-up on the Carina Nebula, I was amused to stumble upon one of its lesser components, “The Defiant Finger” - yes really!
Hubble image.
A big FUCK YOU to the Creationists out there?
Cretinists more like!
Jeebus’ dad put them there to test our faith in him and his sky fairies.
Some of them can breed and/or vote…