Infrared rays of light escape from a galaxy that just formed about 13,100,000,000 years ago. The universe is young, gravity is still holding stars and gas together, and heavier atoms haven’t formed in large quantities — but there’s plenty of hydrogen to make helium, and fusion is already at work. The young stars in this young galaxy are running, sending light across the spectrum, and into every corner of this younger and smaller universe. They have been emitted in all directions, so there is nothing special about this photon stream. But its flow, through the gaps of space, is encountered, for most of its journey, mostly absent.
But mostly nothing. Empty is unexpected, but the law of large numbers is not. Every now and then — every 10 million or 50 million years, for example — light from that primordial galaxy passes (“near” on a galactic scale, however) to some other galaxy. Some of these other galaxies are still being born; Some were torn; Many of them are young. Everything is closer and smaller, from the point of view of several theoretical points along the direction of the ray’s propagation. Each of these galaxies emits its own infrared light, again in all directions, meaning that some of its light is sent in the same general path as light from ancient galaxies. This stream of photons travels, not with each other, but parallel to each other. They’re not headed for anything in particular.
Some time passed.
Then, about 4.6 billion years ago, these rays passed near a cluster of galaxies that some future life forms might call, for convenience’s sake, SMAC 0723. This clustering is large and heavy. In fact it is so heavy that its gravity will affect the photons as they race; Even traveling at 186,000 miles per second (“miles” and “seconds” are scales that future life forms could share to help measure the universe) is not fast enough to escape the relentless pull of gravity. So it’s light attract Towards the galaxy, changing its direction. But it’s still too soon and too far to delay SMAC 0723; He continued walking through the darkness, his path now depicting not a line but an arc.
Its new destination remains largely unpromising: a cloud of hazy gas in the inner arm of an unremarkable spiral galaxy where future life forms will, in a frenzy of creativity compared to the label that gave birth to “SMAC 0723,” to be called the Milky Way, in other things. But 4.6 billion years is a long time. Maybe by the time the light comes, there will be something there.
And so, just in time, the light arrived. So far there have been multiple streams of photons, several thousand upon thousands of light points from each of the thousands of galaxies, each separated from each other by millions or billions of light years and light years. But their light is together. And in that path of light there is a certain point. This point is located a million miles away from an unremarkable blue planet orbiting an unremarkable star in the main sequence. This particular swath is roughly the size of a grain of sand from a nearby planet as seen from about a yard away. And the light hits something there and doesn’t go any further. And this is the light:
This microscopic light field, containing roughly the history of the universe, was Webb’s first deep field, and was the first image released from the James Webb Space Telescope. This is the first of many images the telescope will produce, but you will never forget the first. The first thing you’ll forget: Cold and beautiful, empty and messy, that swath of sky is a portrait of time travel through the vastness of a universe that has room for everything and a gift for nothing. We – you, me, we, this-No problem.
This knowledge, to me, inspires two feelings, diametrically opposed but somewhat incompatible with each other. The first feeling was – well, the word didn’t exist, because they were created by featherless two-legged primitives who had no concept of the true scale of things, or their place in them. But few words come close to that. Awe? Terror? love? Machine?
How about: understanding. Understand that our existence is a cosmological miscalculation and that nothing we can say or do can be counted in a universe that is too large to count. If we disappear tomorrow, or don’t show up at all, no one will notice. I find this frustrating and encouraging. All our joys and accomplishments, are functionally meaningless; But also our pain and regret and very human cruelty. Our tiny patch of sky contains more (and no doubt more) life) than we can understand. Why do you even try?
Well, because we can. That’s the second feeling the JWST photos evoke in me: a little pride. If things have no meaning, there is still order. And which one The system is unknown.
We, these futuristic life forms, those featherless primitive sardines, build and launch extremely complex machines to a gravitationally stable point in space, to take pictures at wavelengths our eyes cannot see, and send them back to us in the form of the one that can. We have done this! We discover (or rather understand) the techniques and physics needed to do this, the social cohesion needed to make it practical, and the philosophy needed to explain it; Nothing else comes close to crawling or swimming around this blue planet. Through chemical accidents, we exist, and through evolutionary change, we have come to a point where we can learn more about the universe that would happily ignore us. We don’t know many things. Now we know a few things. In that victory, even when the prize is humility. In seeing and realizing our meaninglessness, we create meaning.
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