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Cosmic Transmissions (Spring, 2022)
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The James Webb Space Telescope. Illustration by NASA (public domain)
Outer Space

Cosmic Transmissions (Spring, 2022)

Łukasz Kaniewski
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time 8 minutes
Łukasz Kaniewski:
He writes about space, which is where he lives. He has mess on his desk (and likes to rhyme all the time). He uses public transport.

Gazing through dust

At the very end of 2021, after many grand announcements, the James Webb Space Telescope was launched into space. It is deemed a successor of the Hubble Telescope, but while Hubble is sensitive mainly to visible light and to ultraviolet, Webb will photograph space mostly in infrared.

Scientists picked this particular band of the spectrum for important reasons. Visible light does not penetrate the so-called dark nebulas, of which there are heaps in space, but infrared does. The situation is similar with the clouds of cosmic dust that surround emerging stars and planets. In visible light we can only see the dust, while in infrared we see whatever the dust conceals. This is also the case with the cloud enveloping the centre of the galaxy.

Infrared is also advantageous when using a spectrometer to analyse the composition of the atmosphere of distant planets. Another task that suits this band well is observing the oldest parts of the cosmos. The universe is expanding and its furthest, oldest regions are receding ever more quickly: what follows is that the light waves that reach us from there are getting longer and longer. The light,

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Łukasz Kaniewski:
He writes about space, which is where he lives. He has mess on his desk (and likes to rhyme all the time). He uses public transport.
Publish date: 18.03.2022

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Cosmic Transmissions (Autumn, 2021)
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Drawing by Marek Raczkowski
Outer Space

Cosmic Transmissions (Autumn, 2021)

Łukasz Kaniewski
Łukasz Kaniewski:
He writes about space, which is where he lives. He has mess on his desk (and likes to rhyme all the time). He uses public transport.

The universe in a bottle

Juan Maldacena is in many ways the antithesis of Albert Einstein. He doesn’t have a mop of hair. He’s not a pop culture icon. He doesn’t stick his tongue out for photos. What’s more, his study and desk are perfectly, ascetically tidy. Actually, the only thing that connects Maldacena and Einstein is theoretical physics – and the fact that they both imagined the universe anew.

The universe in a bottle – the idea emerged in Juan Maldacena’s head in 1997, as he was sitting at his empty desk and thinking. Within that bottle, described by equations, we have the world with three dimensions of space and working gravity. But that interior is, in fact, a projection of what happens on the two-dimensional surface of the bottle: a hologram. It’s not about the world being a simulation, but rather that fundamentally, we could describe it better, and more simply, if we assumed it has two dimensions.

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