This is the science I love

Everybody likes stunning astronomical pics!

Ars techinca covered the news where the JSWT (James Webb Space Telescope) team, showed the first image acquired by the telescope. It's an deep field image of the SMACS 0723 Galaxy cluster.

Arstechnica JWST article

I must say that the image itself is totally stunning, showing hundread of galaxies (not stars, literally _galaxies_), in a minuscule patch of out sky (just a cluster!).

JSWT SMACS0723 cluster image

By comparison, here the hubble "deep field" image created in 2009, covering a much bigger patch of sky, while still stunning, tells us that what we "see" is literally nothing in our universe.

The main point I would like to convey, though, is that the $10 billions in 25 years spent for this telescope, are worth every single cent of it. Everybody on the internet liked to complain about how this project was late, was costing too much money and how the results were all but guaranteed.

Now that the telescope is operating better than expected, everybody is amazed by it.

If tomorrow NASA would ask all of the world's citizens to spend even $20 Billlions on a new space instrument in 10 or 15 years, with the possibility to get groundbreaking work done, I will be all in on it. We always forget that projects like the JWST, or the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) are unique in their own rights and while I agree with the academics critical of the particle physics community for asking for a bigger collider, I still prefer to spend the equivalent of $5 a year per citizen on projects like the JWST.

Even if we will end with a failure.

We must remember that it's for images like the JWST is giving us back that we finance those kind of projects. I'm wondering what NASA could do with 1% of the US military budget tho.

More money for science, and go JWST!