space / time

with the James Webb Space Telescope now delivering super sharp images of deep space and peering back to the very beginning of the universe, do we need to rethink the concept of time in space completely?

a team of Chinese researchers think so – and have proposed an entirely new way of measuring date, time and distance as we venture out into space. based on signals from rapidly spinning millisecond pulsars, the new universal standard would keep ultra-precise time across the solar system – and unlike existing systems, would not put the Earth – or religion – at its centre

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above image, via NASA:
This landscape of “mountains” and “valleys” speckled with glittering stars is actually the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region called NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. Captured in infrared light by NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope, this image reveals for the first time previously invisible areas of star birth.

Called the Cosmic Cliffs, Webb’s seemingly three-dimensional picture looks like craggy mountains on a moonlit evening. In reality, it is the edge of the giant, gaseous cavity within NGC 3324, and the tallest “peaks” in this image are about 7 light-years high. The cavernous area has been carved from the nebula by the intense ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds from extremely massive, hot, young stars located in the center of the bubble, above the area shown in this image.
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