By Editorial note: In the vast expanse, mysteries persist. Astronomers’
exploration unveils a cosmic question mark — an enigma challenging our
understanding. Decades ago, galaxies’ apparent embrace sparked doubt.
Today, Webb telescope reveals stars cocooned in nebulae, igniting curiosity.
Amid quantum randomness, our universe hums with hidden melodies.
Could this mark symbolize our place in the cosmic symphony? As Webb
extends our gaze, we’re reminded: profound questions inspire our journey.
Embracing the enigma, we uncover the universe’s timeless secrets. Close
scrutiny of a recent image from the Webb Space Telescope revealed some
questionable punctuation. – Talukder Tetulia
The Biggest Question Mark in
Astronomy? You’re Looking at It.
The original news was published in The New York Times on August 18,
2023, by Dennis Overbye.
The astronomers will tell you it is just an optical illusion, a pair of galaxies
caught in the act of mating as seen from the wrong angle. Happens all the
time.
In the 1960 and 70s, Halton Arp, an astronomer at Hale Observatories in
Southern California, caused a ruckus by asserting that galaxies millions of
light-years apart according to conventional cosmological calculations — but
which appeared superimposed together in the sky — were interacting
locally. His claim cast doubt on the Big Bang theory of the universe.
Astronomers now agree that he was wrong.
Now a genuine question mark has been discovered, in the corner of a recent
Webb telescope observation of a pair of dust clouds known as Herbig-Haro
46/47 that are in the process of forming into two stars. The discovery made
a splash on social media. “Ze space mall information kiosk has been found
by JWST,” a commenter joked on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.
Chris Britt, an astronomer at the Baltimore-based Space Telescope Science
Institute, which runs the Webb telescope, attempted to explain. “This
particular pair is so far away, it’s hard to make out much detail,” he said in
an email exchange. “But there are some similar looking galaxy mergers that
have been seen closer to us, including this one called II Zwicky 96.”
If you accept the spooky rules of quantum mechanics and the premise, as
Einstein put it, that God plays dice with the universe, then you have to
accept that chance and randomness are a fundamental bedrock of reality.
In such a universe, where the laws of physics have been grinding away for
14 billion years, coincidences are unforeseeable but inevitable.
Still, there are times when it’s worth stepping back to listen to “the music,”
as Einstein once referred to the beauty and mystery of the cosmos. You are
free to consider that question mark as alien graffiti, a comment on both
their and our relation to existence. Point being, we’ve barely begun to know
anything — that’s why we build telescopes.
Once the Webb has completed its rounds of investigations two decades
from now, we might know a bit more about how this bowl of stars works.
But we still won’t know why we’re here. That question mark, our profound
cosmic ignorance, is one of the great gifts of science.
