It’s Never Been a Better Time to Look Up

There’s never been a better time to look up

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Things have been turbulent on Earth lately. Donald Trump will soon be sworn in as US President, wars are raging and ecosystems are in danger of collapsing. Many aspects of life feel unpredictable. But beyond our planet, things are fine. This is arguably the best time in history to explore space.

The powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revolutionized textbooks several times since its launch in 2021. They are spied galaxies born after the Big Bang, much brighter and larger than scientists thought, surprisingly huge. ancient black holes, and for the first time they identified compounds such as carbon dioxide in the atmospheres of exoplanets. the time His discoveries are coming so fast that scientists sometimes do not know which of his many discoveries to focus their research on.

These riches are growing with many other great observatories that have recently opened or will soon. In 2023, Europa launched its Euclid telescope into space to focus on the dark universe: the mysterious dark energy and dark matter that seem to dominate the cosmos. This year the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile will begin taking pictures of the entire sky every few nights, observing moving objects, short flares and how the universe changes over time. And in 2027 NASA’s The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will join JWST in seeing space through infrared light, peering into the early ages of the universe.

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With the price tag of JWST at $10 billion (the most expensive observatory ever built), Euclid at $1.5 billion, Nancy Grace Roman at $4.3 billion, and Vera C. Rubinen at $473 million and counting, why spend that kind of money when they’re in space. so many problems here on Earth?

Improving life on Earth is a worthy goal, but so is astronomy. Despite these high costs, less than 0.5 percent of the US federal budget goes to NASA each year. And our exploration of space shows that we humans can work together as nations and in competition to achieve great things. It proves that we can devote significant resources and efforts to goals that offer no financial gain or material advantage. Knowledge is valuable in its own right, and its development is justified, even if it makes no practical difference to our planet.

But, in fact, astronomy directly affects people’s lives. The need to power spaceships has driven the development of the solar panel technology we use on Earth. Research into the charge-coupled device (CCD) cameras used in telescopes has made cell phone camera technology possible in our pockets. In addition, seeing the Earth from space has helped us understand our changing climate, and has also brought humans together to appreciate the fragility of our world.

And what we stand to lose if we divert funding to space research is literally astronomical. The Rubin observatory alone will produce about 20 trillion bytes each night, and the Roman telescope will add another trillion each day, to the roughly 50 billion bytes coming in each day from JWST. All that said, astronomers now have access to a firehose of celestial information where they were once lucky to get a sketch. Mining these troves will help us understand what happened when the universe was created. We can figure out how stars and galaxies are born, evolve and die, and hopefully solve some of the biggest mysteries in space: What is dark matter made of? What is the nature of the dark energy that characterizes the cosmos? Is there life beyond us somewhere?

The money and work that goes into understanding the universe and our place in it is far from a waste; this project is one of the noblest that humanity does. Astronomy serves to remind us that we are part of something much bigger than ourselves: that the messiness of life on Earth, its wonders and its tragedies, are not all there is. By looking at the stars, we can see that our lives are a small part of a great and mysterious work.

A few hundred years ago we relied on stories to explain what we looked at in the night sky. Today more than ever we are ready to describe our universe as it really is. This unfolding story is becoming more fascinating than anything humans can come up with, and the knowledge about it is worth every penny we spend.