Random Science News

[P___X]

Just to have some non-political news here as well.

5 times the James Webb telescope rewrote physics in 2024

The James Webb space telescope had several stunning findings this year that changed how we understand the universe.

www.livescience.com

Life as we know it requires at least five key ingredients: hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus. Take one away, and the basic biochemical processes that make life possible would cease. Hydrogen was forged in the first few minutes of the Big Bang. The rest can only be made in the hearts of stars. These ingredients only make their way into interstellar space — where they can participate in the forming of new stars and new solar systems — once those stars die.

A planet like Earth, rich enough in those elements to make life possible, is the product of multiple generations of stellar lives and deaths spanning billions of years. So it was a surprise when astronomers used the James Webb telescope to find a cloud of carbon that formed just 350 million years after the Big Bang.

This pushes the clock way back on when life could have first appeared in the cosmos. If a large amount of carbon was present in a cloud, then the other key ingredients were likely floating around as well. And all those elements could have fashioned a planet before the universe was even half a billion years old. We don't know yet if life existed back then, but this discovery is a major clue that it was possible.

Perhaps the more interesting one is finding carbon as early as 0.350B years post Big Bang. In perspective, we are somewhere 13.8B years post Big Bang, meaning that Carbon Based Lifeforms could have emerged within the first billion years of our Universe and Earth is estimated to be 4.5B years old. Even the evolution of hominids is like a 0.005B year story.

 

[SouprMatt]

I loved this fascinating story about an 18th-century painting.

Fara Dabhoiwala · A Man of Parts and Learning: Francis Williams Gets His Due

The only certainty about the picture is that it shows Francis Williams. No one has ever been able to discover who...

www.lrb.co.uk

A very detailed look at this painting revealed the mathematical and scientific genius of the man portrayed in it.