It's hard to describe how much I love the James Webb telescope. I'm not generally a science enthusiast but I follow its movements and updates like it's some elusive 2000's club kid emerging in and out of a back door. Today it shared a single, cryptic photo, sent anonymously and without message, of a nebula named the "Pillars of Creation". This is how it communicates. The fact that something so surreal is entirely a reality is the wonder of it, but, in my infinite narcissism, I've managed to craft it into a sort of metaphor.
I'm sitting here eating breakfast, reading this article on my laptop, thinking about how much information there is in this world. The image the Webb just released is the Eagle Nebula, a cluster of star nurseries, which the Hubble first famously captured in 1995. The two images are taken from the same "angle", though they are composites of millions of images technically speaking. The one from 1995 shows three maroon pillars of what looks like colored air, cotton candy, and clouds all at once, their literally inconceivable depth and height somehow captured against a flat, hazy blue-green background. The new image transforms these hazy, mythic shapes; the pillars are revealed in bright oranges and browns to be vastly textured, a mass of caves, creases, folds, inlets. The thing looks like a stalactite in a cave or the ruins of something Greek, until one realizes each crevice is bigger than the entire solar system many times over. Where the original image shows a moody haze of background blues, the new one reveals millions of crisply detailed stars, varied from needle-sized white dots to huge diffractions of blue light thousands of times the size of the sun.
I am reading this image in the morning, over a $1.25 container of single-serving Greek yogurt in the university library, when I realize I am crying.
In a few million years, which is a blink for the universe, these pillars will be totally gone, consumed by the stars they are currently nursing. This telescope sees infrared light, which means it's making a composite picture of things that once existed and no longer do. The Webb is the only place where I see the immensity and fragility of life happening together.
So, when I am consumed by my own life -- that is, when breakfast, most days, eats me and not the other way around -- I feel like whatever cosmic powers at work building these great pillars also might be sending a little hello from the New York Times. Something in them whispers not just 'ashes to ashes, dust to dust', but asks us to pay attention.
It is the beauty of being young; this constant hunger for data points like this, amalgamated into some delicious, voracious, image of life. This desire, to be more, see more, absorb more, constantly, and it is a constant state of hunger. I see a picture like this, and I think, all it asks is that we pay attention.
