The James Webb Space Telescope arrives

Some bad news

Ouch.
If it’s already been pinged 5 times, sound like it could be rough ride in the long run.

Last month’s micrometeoroid was not from any meteor shower, NASA said. The U.S. space agency, calling the impact “an unavoidable chance event,” said it has now convened a team of engineers to study ways to avoid future impacts from similar space rocks.

That’ll be interesting: A strategy to avoid similar space rocks.

One thing I would like to know that maybe the telescope can answer is where are all the black holes and neutron stars. Why are they rare? If the universe is 14 billion years old an uncountable amount of blue giants would have reached the end of their star life and changed to a black hole or neutron star in our own galaxy never mind the universe. We say they should be there but not many have been found.

Black Holes

Black holes are some of the most fascinating and mind-bending objects in the cosmos. The very thing that characterizes a black hole also makes it hard to study: its intense gravity. All the mass in a black hole is concentrated in a tiny region, surrounded by a boundary called the “event horizon”. Nothing that crosses that boundary can return to the outside universe, not even light. A black hole itself is invisible.

But astronomers can still observe black holes indirectly by the way their gravity affects stars and pulls matter into orbit. As gas flows around a black hole, it heats up, paradoxically making these invisible objects into some of the brightest things in the entire universe. As a result, we can see some black holes from billions of light-years away. For one large black hole in a nearby galaxy, astronomers even managed to see a ring of light around the event horizon, using a globe-spanning array of powerful telescopes.

Our Work

Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian scientists participate in many black hole-related projects:

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One reason might be that some or most black holes have stripped their region in space of all matter and we are unable to see the indirect indications of the presence of a black hole which themselves are of course invisible.

Perhaps what we call dark energy and dark matter may be due to billions of small or stable black holes which can only be detected now by the absence of any clues altogether. At least until we have found a way to measure dark energy.

I don’t think that black holes would explain the rotation of the galaxy or maybe millions of black holes are the cause but I don’t think that’s what they believe.

I can’t remember who it was I know it was a woman , she notice that the inner galaxy rotates at the same speed as the outer galaxy making look like it locked in a rotation by something we can’t see. In the planetary model the planets closes to the star have a faster orbit then the outer planets which is what they expected to see.

The woman scientist may have been Sabine Hossenfelder a very respected scientist…
Her lectures on Youtube are excellent.

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It is Vera Ruben after reading more about her.

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First picture introduced by President Biden.
And a bit of explanation by NASA Administrator Bill Nelson

Doesn’t look much different from earlier photos.


So how closely have you looked at earlier photos?
Do you really think you are in a position to judge?
Can you image that a learned eye might see more in that image than you can?

I’m noticing some mighty weird gravitational lensing that I’ve never seen quite like that before. But, I’ll wait to read an expert’s interpretation before I put much weight in my impression. :v:t2:

I’m sure astronomers see things lay people cannot, but most of us aren’t in the geek squad so it’s not that interesting.

A few comparisons to Hubble.

Can’t wait to see some exo-planets!

The next pictures will look at these zones:

  • Carina Nebula: one of the largest and brightest nebulae in the sky, approximately 7,600 light-years away, which is a stellar nursery where stars form.
  • WASP-96 b (spectrum): WASP-96 b is a giant planet outside of the solar system composed mainly of gas.
  • Southern Ring Nebula: an expanding cloud of gas, surrounding a dying star approximately 2,000 light-years away from Earth.
  • Stephan’s Quintet: located in the constellation Pegasus, it is the first compact galaxy group ever discovered in 1877, about 290 million light-years away.

Sure. That’s what education and learning is all about, ain’t it. It’s an amazing universe out there.

Here’s a summary made for regular people like us.