Tea at Trianon: One of The Earliest Galaxies Ever Seen

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, August 28, 2023

One of The Earliest Galaxies Ever Seen

From Science Alert:

A red blob lurking in the background of a deep image of space has now been validated as one of the earliest galaxies known in the Universe. It's called Maisie's Galaxy, and spectroscopic analysis has confirmed the James Webb Space Telescope observed the object as it appeared just 390 million years after the Big Bang. That's not quite as early as scientists initially thought, but it is now officially one of the earliest confirmed galaxies in the Universe. According to a team led by astronomer Pablo Arrabal Haro of the US National Science Foundation's NOIRLab, the results not only help confirm the early Universe is indeed way more populated than we expected, but that care is needed in analyzing the JWST observations.

"The exciting thing about Maisie's galaxy is that it was one of the first distant galaxies identified by JWST, and of that set, it's the first to actually be spectroscopically confirmed," says astronomer Steven Finkelstein of the University of Texas at Austin, who named the galaxy in honor of his daughter, on whose birthday the galaxy was discovered last year. (Read more.)