4 ms·

It's pretty cool how much JWST has caught in such a short amount of time. Give it another 5-10 years and we may have some absolutely groundbreaking new celestia

• mabbo 3y ago
  It's really worthwhile to compare it to the hubble in that regard. Pre-hubble, the question was whether the universe would contract into a big crunch, expand slower and slower forever, or balance out somehow in the middle. Then hubble got a good look at universal expansion and we noticed it was speeding up and now we've got Lambda-CDM from that. From this we know what the long term fate of the universe is. That there are galaxies we can see that but we can never reach. That the universe will end from the slow burn out of heat death and not return to the singularity. Just imagine what we'll know after 5-10 years of JWST.
  • dotnet00 3y ago
    Heat death is one of the possibilities, but it's still very much an open question, as it depends on the curvature of the universe and the nature of dark energy.
    • empyrrhicist 3y ago
      I'll take heat death over the big rip. Don't forget vacuum collapse though...
  • tadfisher 3y ago
    If conformal cyclic cosmology is to be believed, heat death is indistinguishable from the singularity as entropy is infinite in both cases, so heat death "may as well be" the singularity.
• deleted 3y ago
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