Status Updates From Pillars of Creation: How th...

...he thought of the physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi’s quip upon learning of the 1936 discovery of the muon, a particle possessing the same properties as an electron but a mass 207 times greater: “Who ordered that?”

As a cosmologist once said at a Space Telescope Science Institute conference, “A poor soldier who died in the trenches in 1914 knew as much about the universe as a caveman.”

Echoing the final line from Darwin’s Origin of Species—“from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved”—they wrote, “The elements have evolved, and are evolving.” Or, as Joni Mitchell put it in her song “Woodstock” a decade later, “We are stardust.”

Hubble’s 2018 version of the Pillars of Creation, for example, assigned hydrogen the color green; Webb’s 2022 version assigned hydrogen the color blue.

“The search for habitable environments and biomarkers in exoplanetary atmospheres,” read the opening sentence of the paper’s abstract, “is the holy grail of exoplanet science.” However unfortunate the syntax (the search isn’t the holy grail; the discovery is), readers were sure to get the point:
Life.

The image was too much to bear on her own. She swiveled her chair away from the screen, bent to the floor, and picked up the family cat. Knowing she was being ludicrous but not caring, Hammel swiveled back to the screen and hefted the cat so it was facing the screen. “Look!” she said to the cat. “Look at the rings!”

The first telescopes to adopt the segmented mirror innovation at a significant scale were, in 1993 and 1996, Keck I and Keck II at the Mauna Kea Observatories, atop a dormant volcano on the Big Island of Hawai‘i. Segmented mirrors had since then become standard for the most ambitious observatories, a category that included Webb.

that honoree was not a scientist but an administrator—one of O’Keefe’s predecessors, James E. Webb, who had served as the director of NASA from 1961 to 1968, during its Space Race heyday.

The farther we can see, the deeper we can peer into the past; the deeper we can peer into the past, the closer we can come to the beginning of that story.

...a concept, a Cold War imperative masquerading as a romantic ideal: what the overview to Space Science in the Twenty-First Century summarized as “humans in space.”