We live in the age of the incredible, a term that is now enough everywhere to dust off our conversation instead of old phrases like “thank you” and “that’s great to hear,” while still being able to describe taste. of a bowl. of ramen and the quality of the latest Marvel movie.
I would say, however, that the real feeling of admiration, of being truly amazed and humiliated by something, is as evasive as ever.
An article in Psychology Today, intended to explain the reverence people felt for the exploits of the 2012 Olympics, said that two things must happen for an event to inspire admiration: it must happen on a large scale and the moment must have a profound effect. about us, “forcing us to review how we see the world.”
Events of this magnitude do not often happen in a person’s life. However, we look for them: in the wild, in the stands of a sports pavilion, a theater or a concert hall, sitting on a meditation pillow or a church pew, because these moments transcend the everyday, expand our understanding of life and, as stated in the same Psychology Today article, forever changing our “definition of what it means to be human.”
And I think we can agree, or not, that the more moments surprise us, that they remind us that today’s problems don’t mean much in the cosmic scheme of things, the better?
We had one of those moments we just witnessed last week, when NASA released five of the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope.
The scientific world was very excited about what he saw: the $ 10 billion platform images were sharper and of better quality than anyone expected.
The Webb telescope also collected evidence of water vapor, fog and some previously unseen clouds around WASP-96b, a planet the size of Saturn, which could help reveal whether smaller bodies orbiting other stars are habitable.
But have you seen the other pictures? The amoeba-like blue and orange nebula, a dying star, sends rings of gas and dust. The spirals of the Stephan Quintet, a compact group of five galaxies millions of light-years away.
Surely the world breathed a collective breath when it saw a distant star cluster called SMACS 0723, hailed as one of the deepest images humanity has ever seen of the cosmos.
I know I did, because my knowledge of the sky can be reduced to a single fact: that when you look at the night sky, you don’t see what you plan to see.
What I mean is that these distant images of stars, planets, clusters, and nebulae take so long to reach our human eyes that then some of the celestial bodies have been transformed into something else or may have completely faded into black.
Although we think we’re watching something immediate, like the 6 o’clock news, what we have in front of us is something old, like the oldest home movie ever made.
Webb’s infrared capabilities and larger mirrors allow it to penetrate cosmic dust and see distant light from further back in time than any previous telescope.
Deep involvement
The light from SMACS 0723 was thought to have originated 13.8 billion years ago, a number so unimaginably far away that it makes my head swim.
So does it: when we look at this image, we see the light captured just after the Big Bang, the event that was believed to have created the universe about 14 billion years ago.
The implication of this fact is a bit profound: when we look at this huge star cluster, surrounded by the arcs of light of previously undetectable galaxies behind SMACS 0723, we are looking back almost at the beginning of time, approaching maybe so close. as we will never be, in the words of the poet, touching the face of God.
This notion is too much for me. Again, so is the most mind-blowing of Webb’s first batch of images: the Carina Nebula, which a New York Times writer said “resembled an eroded and splashed coastal cliff with hundreds of ‘stars astronomers had never seen before.’
Looking over that cliff, towards infinity, it is impossible, at least for a minute, to think of earthly things like the high cost of filling up a gas tank and even the evil that happens in Ukraine.
When I look at it, I feel the same way as Tim Doucette, owner of the Deep Sky Eye Observatory in South Quinan, Yarmouth County, when he spotted images from the Webb telescope this week.
“Who knows what we’ll find out?” said Doucette, an amateur astronomer who is legally blind, but can see objects in the night sky with astonishing clarity, which in itself is impressive.
“Maybe, some new physics, planets with life on them. We’ve only had telescopes in space for 50 years. We’re only scratching the surface of what we can discover if we don’t exploit ourselves.”
What a notion. What a time to be alive.