A week of looking

Death of a star

What the James Webb Space Telescope has seen in a week of looking:

A quintet of galaxies. A nursery of infant stars. A weather report for an exoplanet. And a preview of our own sun’s demise.

After years of delays, a 930,000-mile trip into space and months of speculation over what James Webb Space Telelescope’s  first pictures might reveal, NASA on Tuesday released the first complete set of images captured by its $10-billion observatory.

They show stars in their infancy and in their final gasps, along with sweeping views of the cosmos and the majestic objects in it.

“Every dot of light we see here is an individual star, not unlike our sun. And many of these likely also have planets,” NASA astrophysicist Amber Straughn said while introducing an image of the Carina Nebula, a multihued landscape of gas and nascent stars.

“It just reminds me that our sun and our planets and, ultimately, us were formed out of the same kind of stuff that we see here,” she said. “We humans really are connected to the universe. We’re made of the same stuff in this beautiful landscape”....

Rob's comment:

"Us[sic] were formed"? We should have evolved beyond that by now, though Amber gets a pass, since this was spoken not written English. But couldn't a copy editor have intervened without misquoting her?

My takeaway from these remarkable images: the creation myth in our major religious superstitions is even less plausible than before, unless you think god is still at work creating the universe. The ongoing cosmic process is a lot more impressive without assuming any divine involvement.