Coffee House Musing - Webb, Hubble and Other Space Based Observatories

I think we are a bit lucky to witness what seems like a golden age of astronomy. It's hard to imagine that we will see as great of a leap in technology in the future as we are seeing now. We seemed to have crossed this threshold in compute power and imaging technology that allowed us to make a big step forward. I suspect we will only see incremental changes from here on out, which is nothing to sneeze at, don't get me wrong. However, imaging the first black hole and first planet in another solar system can only happen once.With JWST it feels a bit like the LHC. How much bigger do we have to go to get a significant improvement in observations, and is it worth it? The one exception I can think of would be gathering data on Earth sized planets which would need a big boost in resolution and sensitivity over the JWST.

Exciting times, indeed. There are few things as exciting in sciences as, "Well, that's odd". Astrophysicists now have a set of theories that they will need to adjust and improve.

Scientist: Why don't you trust scientists?
Fundie/creo: Because they are always changing their minds.
Scientist: What would make you trust scientists more?
Fundie/creo: If they changed their mind about creationism.

Nice collection. The Phantom galaxy is really impressive, as is the pic of Neptune.On a humorous note . . .Billions of tax dollars spent so I can have a killer Windows wallpaper. Money well spent.

We can.29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: The Scientific Case for Common Descent No, we can't. What we can do is demonstrate how the mixture of features in fossils exactly matches the predictions made by the theory of evolution. For example, we see fossils with a mixture of modern human and shared ape features. We see fossils with a mixture of dinosaur and bird features. We don't see fossils with a mixture of mammal and bird features. This is massive evidence for the theory of evolution. Yes, we can. I do that very thing here:https://www.evcforum.net/dm.php?control=msg&t=20367And again, more evidence:29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: The Scientific Case for Common Descent Yes, we can. The nested hierarchial pattern demonstrates that these changes took place through mutation, selection, and common ancestry.

Dark energy is ripping the universe apart.