Over the past day or so, you will have almost certainly seen the following — the first full-colour image from the new James Webb Space Telescope.
It’s the sharpest infrared image of the distant universe ever captured. To give you some idea of the numbing scale of what we are looking at — except for the stars splaying into six points in the foreground, every spot of light in this kaleidoscope of dissolving gemstones is its own galaxy made up of billions of stars and planets, the apparent clustering obscuring the stomach-dropping emptiness in between.
It’s the furthest we’ve seen, and it took 4.6 billion years to reach us.
You may have seen this and felt briefly awash with dread at your own insignificance before feeling a calm warmth, a liberating realisation that, should there be anything out there, the entire timeframe of the sublime absurdities of all human life will count for less than a single grain of the Sahara by the time the light of our galaxy completes its journey in the other direction.
It may have occurred to you that we are not separate and discrete observers, adrift in the terrifying black of the universe, but produced by it and part of it, made up at our core of the same materials as everything else, but unique (so far as we know) in that we have the privilege of being able to know, and fear, and love.
Well, forget all that, because we’re here to ruin the James Webb telescope.
A question that’s been lingering since those images came out — apart from the existential ones — is why the hell is it still named after James Webb? Webb was, among other things, the administrator of NASA during most of the 1960s, that golden era leading up to men setting foot on the moon. He was also (at best) complicit with what has come to be known as the “lavender scare” — the purging of hundreds of LGBTIQA+ employees from government service.
It started at the US Department of State around 1950, when Webb was the second in charge, and continued while he was at NASA. Some historians have sought to exonerate him, saying he wasn’t a “leader” of the policy — and perhaps the most depressing element would be trying to find a high-profile government official whose record is completely clean during a period where technically everyone was complicit with a policy of firing people based on suspicions of homosexuality.
I’m gay and have a physics degree. Hell, I even spent one Summer working in a gravity wave lab (different fundamental force I know). I don’t care who, or what, James Webb was and neither should you. Just look at the pics and the spectrographs.
Can you surf a gravity wave?
Yeah but the black hole bombora is a bugger.
I agree. Focus here, now, on the relevant achievement of enabling this incredible knowledge, vision, beauty and awe. His name certainly has a valid place in that.
I’m simply grateful the Americans didn’t name it the Jesus Space Telescope. That they restrained themselves gives us some hope.
Or the Ivanka Trump Patriotescope.
That James Webb image is showing us galaxies as they were as much as 11 or 12 billion years ago. At this depth in time, we are looking at galaxies of first-generation giant blue stars, low in “metals”. It is only the gravitational lens that we see at 4.6 billion years ago
At this stage I am just glad that journalists with LAME (Law Arts Media Economics) degrees didn’t decide to rewrite millions instead of billions because that just seemed too much and must be a typo.
To be fair, the image really does look as if we are looking deep into space. It takes an extra, nerdy step to explain that we are actually looking deep into time. Towards the very beginning of time, in fact.
It took a bit of a effort to cast a snarky comment here, so…congratulations!
Charlie Lewis, you are a grinch.
I’m surprised there were that many gay and trans people in that time who were out enough to be identified and purged.