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You are not alone [1]. My emotional response to this image made my spine tingle and was almost tearful. Just trying to appreciate what I'm looking at will take
by digitalsankhara 4y ago
You are not alone [1]. My emotional response to this image made my spine tingle and was almost tearful. Just trying to appreciate what I'm looking at will take me some time, appreciating all of the hard work and raw science that went into this less so.
As an 11 year old, watching the moon landing, I lived and breathed all things NASA and space related. Now, as I near retirement, I feel just as privileged to view this image in the same way.
[1] I wonder if the work of the JWT will impact Drake's equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
- antognini 4y agoIt absolutely will. One of the big advances in the past two decades was the discovery of exoplanets, and at this point we've discovered enough of them that we can get reasonable constraints on their frequency (along with sketchier constraints on Earth-like planets). That alone removed one of the major uncertainties in the Drake equation. JWST will be able to make far better measurements of exoplanet atmospheres than any other telescope, so this should start to constrain how many Earth-like planets have atmospheres with biological signatures. These constraints will remove the next big uncertainty in the Drake equation.
- digitalsankhara 4y agoAbsolutely. The resolution of the spectral plots in yesterday's images was amazing.
- neuronic 4y agoMe too, and it really saddens me that I am mostly met with shoulder shrugs and rolling eyes by friends and family around, most of them with graduate university degrees too... I was really excited about the images releasing today.