NASA gets even more funding than that (about $65 million per day) but their production is probably actually pretty high on the Federal government value per dollar scale. Having a country full of scientific expertise is enormously valuable if you can stop religious loonies from seizing control of the country.
No, not really. And that’s kind of the point.
The value of the images isn’t in their visual appeal. That’s oversold.
The universe is big and I agree it seems unlikely we’re alone but there are reasonable people arguing the evidence implies we are.
I assume these images are a little processesed, but I think that NASA should be faking them up a bit. Maybe airbrush one so it looks like you can see baby Jesus riding a dinosaur to school. Might open up more support for fundidng imo.
Doing spectroscopy on an exoplanet is so technically challenging I’m just constantly astonished it can be done.
At some point you can’t go back any further in time and there will always be unobservable parts of the universe.
In a sense we’re not too far, because we’re looking here at 12 billion year old light when the big bang was 13.7 billion years ago, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets to be exponentially more difficult to keep looking further back the further back you go.
Weirdly, it’s possible to see residual cosmic radiation from the big bang anywhere, because the big bang was everywhere.
in astronomy 101 at 18 fresh out of a religious cult this blew my mind. i had consumed all the astronomy stuff my school had and it never made mention of this once. i cornered my poor professor and drilled him about it, quickly coming to the conclusion this absolutely buried any of the young earth bullshit I’d been taught my whole life (which i long had rejected, I just never had encountered a replacement until that point)
if you bring up cosmic background radiation to a young earth “scientist,” you’ll have some fun.
Here is another new one. It’s a dying star. More detail on NASAs Instagram if you are interested.
From Reddit;
“ Astronomer here! For those who want some more info about what we are seeing here, this is the Southern Ring Nebula, aka NGC 3132, which is a planetary nebula, which has nothing to do with planets and is instead the outer shell of a star like our sun that died and poufed out its outer layers. (which can then potentially help trigger new star formation). JWST can tell us a lot about how this process happens and how the elements get distributed… and a gorgeous image along the way sure doesn’t hurt! :) As for the image itself… wow. This is gonna sound kinda dumb but I never thought I would see the layers of ejecta with this level of detail!!! Embedded with little galaxies at much greater distances! Incredible!
Edit: There’s some confusion about the central star, so I looked into this carefully. There are actually two stars in the center of this nebula, one of which is the white dwarf that ejected the layers, and the other is still another star in its “normal” stage of life. They are easier to tell apart in the second image. Which OMG, I’m am SO EXCITED about this! The reason is a lot of questions are out there about how planetary nebulae form, and one theory is you require a binary companion to get these detailed structures. Seeing the second star like this enshrouded in dust is a first, and wow I can’t wait to see what JWST finds next!!!”
bro what
it is even more mind boggling because I’ve long thought there is actual somewhat room in mainstream scientific dialogue for creationism that is compatible with modern scientific theory (eg we still dont know origin of big bang so you could throw in a deity somewhere if you wanted) but nah, they stubbornly stick to this “literal” and badly interpreted version of the bible and try to make it science.
it basically comes down to christians refusing to accept that the bible should not be intepreted literally.
you’re talking fermi paradox, right?
just depends where/when the great filter is…
The things we know about life, the universe, the nature of existence, evolution, etc, are 1,000,000x more astounding and beautiful than anything in the bible, why not look for God in all that?
well, I mean, yeah, the Bible is a Frankenstein nightmare of thousands of years of oral tradition that all conflicts with each other and has had thousands of revisions motivated by numerous empires and political motivations, all crammed into a big pile of nonsense that people still try to make sense of. I’m just saying if someone wanted to make creationism and what we know about actual science compatible they could, they just do not because they refuse to except that the Bible cannot be taken literally because it’s literally nonsense.
Yes, I’m agreeing.
To throw in my two cents, if we could see far enough, we’d get to a point where the first stars are just turning on and there would be fewer and fewer visible galaxies. Idk if we can build a big enough telescope to see that. Otoh, we can in a way already look past that to a point soon after the big bang because we can “see” the cosmic background radiation, which isn’t quite just a big uniform smear, but pretty close.
it’s funny, until the last 25 years or so there wasnt a big push to make young earth creationism actually regarded as real science, and in their attempts to do so have fallen into some pretty hilarious mental gymnastics regarding what we 100% know as fact today - lots of it devolves into “well the devil must have put that there to lead people astray”
Well, that’s exactly would the devil would do!
you may scoff, but almost half of americans believe god created the universe in the last 10,000 years and I guarantee your tax dollars are used teaching this. I consider flat earth theory more scientifically plausible. we wonder why people have such a difficult time digesting easily presented science re: covid in the last few years, well, when you grow up being taught that facts don’t matter and that sky daddy took a rib from a dude and created some bitch that ate a cursed fruit a few thousand years ago - well, you reap what you sow