The more pressure on ZOG, the faster the rootless, transnational, satanic clique will collapse, and Europe will once again be a homeland composed of free White nations.
Nevertheless, Moscow is prepared to cooperate with more pragmatic European leaders in the future, the foreign minister said. “If some nationally-oriented politicians emerge [in Europe] who understand all the benefits of equal and mutually beneficial partnership with Russia, I can assure you, there will be no issues on our side,” he said.
“We are realists. We will continue to work with those few Europeans that cherish friendship with Russia. We will not cooperate with Russophobes,” Lavrov added.
When the first domino falls, ZOG's entire rotten edifice will collapse in on itself:
Relations between Moscow and Brussels are now at their “lowest point,” Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, told TASS in an interview published on Tuesday. The EU has declared a “hybrid war” on Moscow by unquestioningly following the US, the minister added.
The policies of Brussels have only hurt the interests and well-being of Europeans themselves, Lavrov said. He also accused Washington of barring EU nations from conducting dialogue on energy with Moscow, even though Russia’s supplies of fuel provided Europe with “unprecedented prosperity” for decades.
Following the launch of Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine, the EU began gradually reducing Russian energy imports through sanctions, which include a ban on EU imports of seaborne Russian oil, as well as a $60-per-barrel cap on Russian seaborne crude.
In late July, EU member states agreed on a plan to reduce their gas consumption by 15% over the coming months to reduce their dependence on Russian energy. These policies, coupled with the sanctions and the conflict in Ukraine, have led to an energy crunch in the EU, with gas prices climbing to record highs.
Russia will “no longer do ‘business as usual’” with partners such as these, Lavrov warned, adding that Moscow has no intention of “banging its head against a wall,” as it can find countries to work with beyond Europe.
World Jewry knows perfectly well that "demographics is density":
It must be nice to be able to explicitly organize and fight for your People without being harassed by ZOG, the FBI, the CIA, along with every other ungodly force imaginable. I guess being able to casually, openly, blatantly pursue their vested group interests is one reason why they consider themselves to be "Chosen".
Economic benefits and discounts will likely be offered to Jews to move into areas with significant Palestinian populations.
As part of deals struck to form Israel's new government last week, far-right parties and Likud have agreed to enforce a "Judaisation" plan in the Galilee and Naqab (Negev) regions, which have a significant population of indigenous Palestinian citizens.
The Religious Zionism alliance, led by Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, has previously said it intended to strengthen Jewish settlement in the two regions located in northern and southern Israel, respectively.
This will likely be done through offering economic benefits and discounts to Jews to encourage them to move to those areas, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
The Religious Zionism party headed by Smotrich, who is set to become the finance minister, will have a seat on the council of the Israel Land Authority (ILA) which is in charge of allocating state lands for residential and other uses.
Palestinian citizens of Israel who live in the Naqab region have long accused the Israeli government of attempting to uproot them through various tactics.
Those include confiscation of lands from native Palestinians and turning landowners into tenants. Additionally, the Israeli government has been accused of preventing the expansion of Palestinian villages and encircling them new Jewish settlements.
Under the new government, the enforcement of the ILA policy will fall under Ben-Gvir's authority as national security minister.
His Jewish Power party will also receive the Negev and Galilee Development Ministry, according to the terms of his coalition deal with Likud, the party of Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu.
Anti-Palestinian policies
Ben-Gvir, campaigning on anti-Palestinian far-right policies, has surged into the mainstream in Israel in recent years.
Among other controversial remarks is his frequent categorisation of Palestinian colleagues as "terrorists". He has also called for the deportation of his political opponents.
In his youth, his views were deemed too extreme by the army, which banned him from compulsory military service.
So far, he has reportedly secured several agreements with Likud that have raised alarm for Palestinians living in the occupied territories as well as those with Israeli citizenship.
There are nearly two million Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, making up nearly 20 percent of the population. Around 300,000 of them live in the Naqab.
Netanyahu had announced late on Wednesday that he formed a new government, minutes before a midnight deadline set by President Isaac Herzog.
Israel's longest-serving prime minister will return to power after his Likud party, far-right religious Zionist factions and ultra-Orthodox parties secured 64 of the parliament's 120 seats in what will be Israel's most right-wing administration in history.
Meanwhile, here in Occupied America, ZOG won't let us have borders:
Because, here in America, we aren't "Chosen". We're merely fungible, interchangeable, malleable cattle, with no identity, soul, spirit, history, or destiny - because those things are reserved for the "Chosen". If Whites want those things, they're haters, terrorists, bigots, racists, and fascists. But these rules don't apply to the "Chosen". Stop the hate.
The James Webb Space Telescope has captured a unique perspective of the universe, including never-before-seen galaxies that glitter like diamonds in the cosmos.
The new image, shared on Wednesday as part of a study published in the Astronomical Journal, was taken as part of the Prime Extragalactic Areas for Reionization and Lensing Science observing program, called PEARLS.
It’s one of the first medium-deep-wide-field images of the universe, with “medium-deep” meaning the faintest objects visible, and “wide-field” referring to the region of the cosmos captured in the image.
“The stunning image quality of Webb is truly out of this world,” said study coauthor Anton Koekemoer, research astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, who assembled the PEARLS images into mosaics, in a statement. “To catch a glimpse of very rare galaxies at the dawn of cosmic time, we need deep imaging over a large area, which this PEARLS field provides.”
The Webb telescope focused on a part of the sky called the North Ecliptic Pole and was able to use eight different colors of near-infrared light to see celestial objects that are 1 billion times fainter than what can be seen with the unaided eye.
Thousands of galaxies gleam from a range of distances, and some of the light in the image has traveled almost 13.5 billion years to reach us.
“I was blown away by the first PEARLS images,” said study coauthor Rolf Jansen, research scientist at Arizona State University and a PEARLS coinvestigator, in a statement.
“Little did I know, when I selected this field near the North Ecliptic Pole, that it would yield such a treasure trove of distant galaxies, and that we would get direct clues about the processes by which galaxies assemble and grow, he said. “I can see streams, tails, shells and halos of stars in their outskirts, the leftovers of their building blocks.”
Researchers combined Webb data with three colors of ultraviolet and visible light captured by the Hubble Space Telescope to create the image. Together, the wavelengths of light from both telescopes reveal unprecedented depth and detail of a wealth of galaxies in the universe. Many of these distant galaxies have always eluded Hubble, as well as ground-based telescopes.
The image represents just a portion of the full PEARLS field, which will be about four times larger. The mosaic is even better than scientists expected after running simulations in the months before Webb began making scientific observations in July.
“There are many objects that I never thought we would actually be able to see, including individual globular clusters around distant elliptical galaxies, knots of star formation within spiral galaxies, and thousands of faint galaxies in the background,” said study coauthor Jake Summers, a research assistant at Arizona State University, in a statement.
Other pinpricks of light in the image represent a range of stars in our Milky Way galaxy.
Measuring diffuse light in front of and behind the stars and galaxies in the image is like “encoding the history of the universe” because it tells a story of cosmic evolution, according to study coauthor Rosalia O’Brien, a graduate research assistant at Arizona State University, in a statement.
"The passage from the Chaos of the Big Bang to the Cosmos that we are beginning to know is the most awesome transformation of matter and energy that we have been privileged to glimpse."
-- Carl Sagan, Cosmos
"The passage from the teleology of the Big Seed to the Cosmos that we are beginning to know is the most awesome transubstantiation of matter and energy that we have been privileged to glimpse."
Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona via David Kaiser and MIT:
“Reheating was an insane time, when everything went haywire,” says David Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and professor of physics at MIT. As the Big Bang theory goes, reports MIT, somewhere around 13.8 billion years ago the universe exploded into being, as an infinitely small, compact fireball of matter that cooled as it expanded, triggering reactions that cooked up the first stars and galaxies, and all the forms of matter that we see (and are) today.
CORRECTED TRANSLATION:
“When Reality Sprouted” — A Trillionth of a Second Before the Big Seed
“Reheating was a creative flourishing, when reality sprouted,” says I. As the Big Seed theory goes, reports this blog, somewhere around 13.8 billion years ago the universe emerged into being, as an infinitely small, compact point of matter that cooled as it expanded, triggering reactions that cooked up the first stars and galaxies, and all the forms of matter that we see (and are) today.
Marx had - literally and figuratively - one Hell of a run.
"The idea of time, space, matter and energy coming into existence from nothing, is completely incompatible with a materialist outlook on nature.
The whole experience of humanity demonstrates that not a drop of matter can be created or destroyed. Matter is its own cause: combining, dispersing and recombining for all eternity. To posit an act of Creation poses the question: what is its cause? If it was not a material factor (and, according to Big Bang cosmology, it could not have been a material factor as matter itself came into existence with the Big Bang) then it must have been an immaterial Creator: God.
"The date of Creation might have been pushed back from 6,000 years ago to 13.8 billion years ago, but this does not diminish its absurdity. No, as materialists we reject the idea of matter being created from nothing. The material universe is infinite and evolving. Certainly this poses new problems: by definition an infinite universe will always contain more to be discovered. As old problems are solved, new, higher ones are posed. But just as the Creation myth of Genesis only appeared to ‘solve’ the problem of where the Earth came from, a problem that was insoluble until Earth’s nebular origins were discovered in the 18th Century; so the Big Bang’s own act of Creation only appears to ‘solve’ problems such as the Doppler shift and the CMBR.
"We are not cosmologists. We by no means pretend to offer complete solutions to such problems. But we are confident that new discoveries and observations – like those of the JWST – will confirm the materialist outlook and overturn the idea of a moment of Creation...
"Academia is tending in the direction of philosophical idealism, led there by a ruling class that clings to the ‘hand of God’, and of an academic aristocracy that fiercely defends its interests, prestige, budgets and scholarships. The sciences are no exception. The logical conclusion of idealism is world creation: matter coming into existence from pure nothingness. In the form of Big Bang cosmology, such a view has made its way into the respectable corridors of academia.
"But this is just one tendency. In opposition to it, there are many scientists who wish to stand against the stream of idealism and mysticism in the sciences. Noteworthy is Eric Lerner, who has been ostracised by the scientific community for his brave stand against the Big Bang. We highly recommend his article The Big Bang didn't happen, commenting on the JWST’s results.
"Marxists understand that the battle against decaying capitalism consists not only in a political and economic, but also in an ideological struggle. As Lenin explained, in that fight, Marxists must learn to find allies among 'those modern natural scientists who incline towards materialism and are not afraid to defend and preach it as against the fashionable philosophical wanderings into idealism and scepticism which are prevalent in so-called educated society.'"
The Marxists' fatal problem is that there is nothing more absurd than their materialist outlook. It is their dogmatic assertion - that reality came about via unguided processes - which is absurd, irredeemably so. Here's the latest for the Marxists' edification. Enjoy!
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A new supercomputer simulation animates the evolution of the universe
DECEMBER 2, 2022, AT 10:00 AM / By James R. Riordon
It’s the most accurate, detailed glimpse of the early cosmos yet, researchers report:
"The infant universe transforms from a featureless landscape to an intricate web in a new supercomputer simulation of the cosmos’s formative years.
"An animation from the simulation shows our universe changing from a smooth, cold gas cloud to the lumpy scattering of galaxies and stars that we see today. It’s the most complete, detailed and accurate reproduction of the universe’s evolution yet produced, researchers report in the November Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
"This virtual glimpse into the cosmos’s past is the result of CoDaIII, the third iteration of the Cosmic Dawn Project, which traces the history of the universe, beginning with the “cosmic dark ages” about 10 million years after the Big Bang. At that point, hot gas produced at the very beginning of time, about 13.8 billion years ago, had cooled to a featureless cloud devoid of light, says astronomer Paul Shapiro of the University of Texas at Austin."
The Judeo-plutocracy has reinterpreted our literal universe and everything in it, to suit their ideological and racial agendas. They have done so via overt and covert warfare, and they spared no level of brutality and duplicity to attain their objectives. They are shameless and they have no respect for truth. Truth is absolutely irrelevant to them. All they care about is their agenda, and they bend everything to suit it. There will be some kind of Marxist-inspired cosmology coming down the pike, similar to how they manufactured Boasian anthropology - it's always the same agenda. In fact, Eric Lerner (whose 1992 book was resurrected in a pathetic attempt to save the day for Marxian materialism) is being set up to be the cosmological version of anthropologist Franz Boas. Nevertheless, the multiverse is probably the best ZOG can do.
No, The James Webb Space Telescope Did Not Disprove the Big Bang (Eric Lerner is Delusional)
Marxists hate the Big Bang. The reason Marxists hate it is because it negates their materialist philosophy. If the universe is nothing but matter in motion, the Marxists win. But if the universe is purposeful / guided / teleological, then it is not merely matter in motion, but instead was initiated by a creative force, and this entails teleology, which concomitantly obliterates materialism: Marx loses, Hegel wins.
The universe is not meaningless matter in eternal random motion, but rather is imbued with meaning and purpose, and even arguably alive. There is purpose and meaning to the cosmos, thus destroying Marxian materialism and all the social decay and moral / ethical rot it enables.
We are in a spiritual war, and these ideas are where it's being fought. The outcome of this war will determine the direction of world history. Notice how Lerner and his book are mentioned at the end of the Marxist.com article. This is ideological warfare, as openly admitted and clearly stated in said article. Notice even the title of the article: "a" universe, not "the" universe - thus leaving open their retreat into the multiverse. That retreat, however, has been cutoff. Materialism is dead. Teleology is back in town.
This Amazing Interactive Map of the Universe Takes You All the Way Back to the Big Seed
NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. Rep. Mary Miller of Illinois, speaking at a rally Saturday night with former President Donald Trump, called the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade a “victory for White life.”
Miller’s spokesman said the Illinois Republican had intended to say the decision was a victory for a “right to life.” The line as delivered was out of step with the disproportionate impact the repeal of abortion rights will have on women of color. [ed., "White" is a color too].
Miller is running for reelection in the state’s newly redrawn 15th Congressional District against GOP Rep. Rodney Davis with the former president’s blessing. She had been invited on stage to speak by Trump, who held the rally in Mendon, Illinois, to turn out the vote ahead of the state’s Tuesday primary.
“President Trump, on behalf of all the MAGA patriots in America, I want to thank you for the historic victory for White life in the Supreme Court yesterday,” she said, drawing cheers from the crowd.
Miller spokesman Isaiah Wartman told The Associated Press that it was “a mix-up of words.”
“You can clearly see in the video … she’s looking at her papers and looking at her speech,” Wartman said.
Her campaign noted that she is the grandmother of several nonwhite grandchildren, including one with Down syndrome.
The freshman congresswoman, who was among those who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election, previously came under criticism for quoting Adolf Hitler.
“Hitler was right on one thing. He said, ’Whoever has the youth has the future,’” Miller said in a speech last year, according to video posted by WCIA-TV. She later apologized after Democrats in Illinois called for her resignation.
The rally came as some elements of the far rightpro-White have pushed the “great replacement theory” [ed., the "great replacement" is not a "theory" - it is demographic fact], a racist ideology [ed., because it's "racist" if Whites want to survive] that alleges White people and their influence are being “replaced” by people of color. Proponents blame both immigration as well as demographic changes, including White birth rates.
During the rally, Trump took a victory lap for the Supreme Court’s bombshell ruling Friday ending the constitutional right to abortion. The three conservative justices he appointed all voted in favor.
He noted that in 2016, he promised to appoint judges who opposed abortion rights.
“Yesterday the court handed down a victory for the Constitution, a victory for the rule of law, and above all, a victory for life,” he told the crowd, which broke into a chant of “Thank you Trump!.”
Trump at the rally also endorsed Republican Darren Bailey, who is running to become the party’s nominee for governor.
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But was it a mistake? The attendees cheered, and they had no way of knowing whether it was a mistake. Despite the System Whore disclaimers about gaffes and non-White grandchildren and Down syndrome, perhaps the enemy coalition has finally gone too far and a brutal, decisive blowback is on its way. We will see.
In the sixth episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Officer Jean Luc Picard and his android companion Data find themselves on the edge of the known universe. As Picard examines the barrier in front of the Enterprise, Data declares that they’ve landed “where none have gone before.”
While researchers have not quite made it to the edge of the universe, they did just creep one step further with the discovery of a galaxy up to 13.5 billion light-years away, named HD1. In a study published today in The Astrophysical Journal and an accompanying paper in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters, University of Tokyo astronomer Yuichi Harikane and his colleagues outline the methods of discovery and possible implications of HD1’s existence. It’s the most distant cosmic body on record so far.
“It was very hard work to find HD1 out of more than 700,000 objects,” Harikane said in a press release. “HD1’s red color matched the expected characteristics of a galaxy 13.5 billion light-years away surprisingly well, giving me a little bit of goosebumps when I found it.”
Harikane and his team spent over 1,200 hours capturing images through the VISTA Telescope in Chile, the former Spitzer Space Telescope, and both the UK Infrared Telescope and the Subaru Telescope on the Big Island of Hawaii. They then used an array of radio wavelength receivers, also in Chile, to calculate redshift, a formula that helps astronomers estimate distances based on how light changes as the universe expands. The data showed an unexpectedly bright UV signature from HD1, which the study argues is due to one of two causes.
“The very first population of stars that formed in the universe were more massive, more luminous and hotter than modern stars,” Fabio Pacucci, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts and coauthor of the study, said in the press release. “If we assume the stars produced in HD1 are these first, or Population III, stars, then its properties could be explained more easily. In fact, Population III stars are capable of producing more UV light than normal stars, which could clarify the extreme ultraviolet luminosity of HD1.”
HD1 might contain stars created relatively soon after the Big Seed, which would explain the high amount of light intensity researchers logged. If the luminosity is not due to Population III Stars, it could be coming from a black hole 100 million times as massive as the sun. Such a gigantic void would consume mass violently enough to generate bright light. These hypotheses, however, do not explain the rate at which the superpowered galaxy forms stars. HD1 appears to churn out roughly 100 stars per year, which is nearly 10 times the rate of similarly fashioned galaxies.
“Answering questions about the nature of a source so far away can be challenging,” Pacucci said in a press release. “It’s like guessing the nationality of a ship from the flag it flies, while being faraway ashore, with the vessel in the middle of a gale and dense fog. One can maybe see some colors and shapes of the flag, but not in their entirety. It’s ultimately a long game of analysis and exclusion of implausible scenarios.”
While questions continue to surround HD1, like a more exact distance, size, and composition, the team’s findings furthers humanity’s map of the known universe. And with further confirmation, they could deepen our understanding of the origins of the universe, too.
It all started around 13.8 billion years ago with a big, cosmological “bang”"sprout" that brought the universe suddenly and spectacularly into existence. Shortly after, the infant universe cooled dramatically and went completely dark.
cosmic teleological evolution
Evolution of simulated properties in the main Thesan run. Time progresses from left to right. The dark matter (top panel) collapse in the cosmic web structure composed of clumps (haloes) connected by filaments, and the gas (second panel from the top) follows, collapsing to create galaxies. These produce ionizing photons that drive cosmic reionization (third panel from the top), heating up the gas in the process (bottom panel). -- Courtesy of THESAN Simulations.
Then, within a couple hundred million years after the Big BangSeed, the universe woke up, as gravity gathered matter into the first stars and galaxies. Light from these first stars turned the surrounding gas into a hot, ionized plasma — a crucial transformation known as cosmic reionization that propelled the universe into the complex structure that we see today.
Now, scientists can get a detailed view of how the universe may have unfolded during this pivotal period with a new simulation, known as Thesan, developed by scientists at MIT, Harvard University, and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics.
Named after the Etruscan goddess of the dawn, Thesan is designed to simulate the “cosmic dawn,” and specifically cosmic reionization, a period which has been challenging to reconstruct, as it involves immensely complicated, chaoticspontaneous interactions, including those between gravity, gas, and radiation.
The Thesan simulation resolves these interactions with the highest detail and over the largest volume of any previous simulation. It does so by combining a realistic model of galaxy formation with a new algorithm that tracks how light interacts with gas, along with a model for cosmic dust.
With Thesan, the researchers can simulate a cubic volume of the universe spanning 300 million light years across. They run the simulation forward in time to track the first appearance and evolution of hundreds of thousands of galaxies within this space, beginning around 400,000 years after the Big BangSeed, and through the first billion years.
So far, the simulations align with what few observations astronomers have of the early universe. As more observations are made of this period, for instance with the newly launched James Webb Space Telescope, Thesan may help to place such observations in cosmic context.
For now, the simulations are starting to shed light on certain processes, such as how far light can travel in the early universe, and which galaxies were responsible for reionization.
“Thesan acts as a bridge to the early universe,” says Aaron Smith, a NASA Einstein Fellow in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “It is intended to serve as an ideal simulation counterpart for upcoming observational facilities, which are poised to fundamentally alter our understanding of the cosmos.”
Smith and Mark Vogelsberger, associate professor of physics at MIT, Rahul Kannan of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and Enrico Garaldi at Max Planck have introduced the Thesan simulation through three papers, the third published today in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Follow the light
In the earliest stages of cosmic reionization, the universe was a dark and homogenous space. For physicists, the cosmic evolution during these early “dark ages” is relatively simple to calculate.
“In principle you could work this out with pen and paper,” Smith says. “But at some point gravity starts to pull and collapse matter together, at first slowly, but then so quickly that calculations become too complicated, and we have to do a full simulation.”
To fully simulate cosmic reionization, the team sought to include as many major ingredients of the early universe as possible. They started off with a successful model of galaxy formation that their groups previously developed, called Illustris-TNG, which has been shown to accurately simulate the properties and populations of evolving galaxies. They then developed a new code to incorporate how the light from galaxies and stars interact with and reionize the surrounding gas — an extremely complex process that other simulations have not been able to accurately reproduce at large scale.
“Thesan follows how the light from these first galaxies interacts with the gas over the first billion years and transforms the universe from neutral to ionized,” Kannan says. “This way, we automatically follow the reionization process as it unfolds.”
Finally, the team included a preliminary model of cosmic dust — another feature that is unique to such simulations of the early universe. This early model aims to describe how tiny grains of material influence the formation of galaxies in the early, sparse universe.
Cosmic bridge
With the simulation’s ingredients in place, the team set its initial conditions for around 400,000 years after the Big BangSeed, based on precision measurements of relic light from the Big BangSeed. They then evolved these conditions forward in time to simulate a patch of the universe, using the SuperMUC-NG machine — one of the largest supercomputers in the world — which simultaneously harnessed 60,000 computing cores to carry out Thesan’s calculations over an equivalent of 30 million CPU hours (an effort that would have taken 3,500 years to run on a single desktop).
The simulations have produced the most detailed view of cosmic reionization, across the largest volume of space, of any existing simulation. While some simulations model across large distances, they do so at relatively low resolution, while other, more detailed simulations do not span large volumes.
“We are bridging these two approaches: We have both large volume and high resolution,” Vogelsberger emphasizes.
Early analyses of the simulations suggest that towards the end of cosmic reionization, the distance light was able to travel increased more dramatically than scientists had previously assumed.
“Thesan found that light doesn’t travel large distances early in the universe,” Kannan says. “In fact, this distance is very small, and only becomes large at the very end of reionization, increasing by a factor of 10 over just a few hundred million years.”
The researchers also see hints of the type of galaxies responsible for driving reionization. A galaxy’s mass appears to influence reionization, though the team says more observations, taken by James Webb and other observatories, will help to pin down these predominant galaxies.
“There are a lot of moving parts in [modeling cosmic reionization],” Vogelsberger concludes. “When we can put this all together in some kind of machinery and start running it and it produces a dynamic universe, that’s for all of us a pretty rewarding moment.”
This research was supported in part by NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the Gauss Center for Supercomputing.
The Cosmic dark ages: How astrophysicists will peek into the distant past
The James Webb Space Telescope could help scientists learn about the cosmic dark ages and how they ended.
A few weeks ago I wrote a post arguing against the Multiverse, an idea that emerges from scientists studying the frontiers of cosmology. This sparked a debate between me and fellow BigThink astrophysicist Ethan Siegal (who is very much in favor of the Multiverse). While our back-and-forth was super interesting and fun, I do not want anyone to walk away from that exchange thinking that I am somehow anti-cosmology. While I have not published papers on the study of the Universe’s history, I have taught the class at undergraduate and graduate levels. Each time I do, it blows my mind. It is like reading the material for the first time.
In that spirit, today I wanted to unpack a key aspect of our modern cosmological narrative that will be in the spotlight as the James Webb Space Telescope comes online: the era of reionization.
A grand model
The best model we have for the evolution of the Universe is the Big BangSeed. According to this model, the Universe started as an infinitely dense, infinitely hot complex of space, time, matter, and energy. From these initial conditions came the expansion of space-time. This led to everything we see today: galaxies, planets, people – everything.
The Big BangSeed is a pretty grand idea. It leaves astronomers with a lot of details to unpack, starting from the Universe’s earliest stages, one zillionth of a second after expansion started, to the cosmos we see 13.8 billion years later. One detail astronomers have long pondered is what happened after the formation of the cosmic plasma of hydrogen and helium — this took shape about 300,000 years after the Big BangSeed — but before the full assembly of galaxies.
For years scientists have built their Big BangSeed models on the idea that the Universe continually cooled as it expanded. This allowed some interesting things to happen along the way. After a few hundred thousand years, for example, the initial fireball of creation — it is not really a ball, it is all of spacetime — would have cooled to a temperature that allows protons and electrons to move slowly enough to latch on to each other and form the first atoms of hydrogen.
The cosmic dark ages
Hydrogen formation marks a critical transition for the infant universe. Once lots of hydrogen exists, the relation between matter and radiation changes dramatically. Some kinds of light that were locked into a tightly coupled dance with matter are suddenly freed to wander the Universe unhindered. Other kinds of light are suddenly trapped. This happens to strong ultraviolet photons (the stuff that gives you a sunburn).
Hydrogen atoms are like UV sponges; they love to absorb UV light particles. UV light has a hard time traveling freely through the Universe once hydrogen forms. Any UV light that is emitted gets absorbed by neighboring hydrogen atoms. The presence of large amounts of hydrogen means the universe is dark (at least in terms of ultraviolet light). In fact, scientists call the period after hydrogen formed the “dark ages.”
Shining a light
The Universe we live in now, however, is far more transparent. This means that eventually the dark ages must have ended. Astronomers have long believed that the first generation of stars (and black holes) helped end the dark ages. When the young universe matured enough to allow stars to form (perhaps a few hundred million years after the Big BangSeed), the light they emitted was powerful enough to tear apart hydrogen atoms floating in space. The light ionizes the hydrogen, pulling the atom’s sole electron away from the single proton in its nucleus.
As the universe begins to fill with stars, the amount of hydrogen gas in space drops. Astronomers call this the period of reionization. They believe that if they look far enough out into space — which means far enough back in time — they should eventually see where reionization occurs. This will be the boundary between the old, dark universe and the newer, transparent one. Over the past decade, numerous studies looking deep into the cosmic past have given us glimpses of this reionization era.
A moment to reflect
With the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, a new window will open on the end of the cosmic dark ages. The telescope is optimized for infrared light. Because of the Universe’s expansion, photons that were associated with short-wavelength UV light have had their wavelengths stretched into the longer infrared band. This makes the new telescope the perfect instrument for catching the details of the cosmic dark age and reionization.
Which brings me back to how mind-blowing cosmology is as a scientific field. I may have my doubts about ideas like the Multiverse that emerge from the study of the earliest instants after the Big BangSeed. But that is not all there is to cosmological studies. Mapping the history of the whole universe is the full task of the field. As we begin our deep dive into the reionization era via the James Webb Space Telescope, we can remember just how detailed that history has become, and how far our cosmological knowledge has taken us.
TOKYO — Russia said Monday it would halt negotiations with Japan regarding a post-World War II peace treaty in response to Tokyo’s escalating sanctions over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine — the latest sign of deteriorating bilateral relations.
In a statement, the Russian Foreign Ministry said the country has no intention of continuing peace talks, which had been stalled since 2020. It blamed Japan for its “anti-Russian policy” and said it would terminate visa-free trips by Japanese citizens to a chain of islands between Japan and Russia, and withdraw from joint economic projects on the islands.
Japan has imposed wide-reaching economic sanctions on Russia since last month, in a dramatic turn away from its years of rapprochement with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Japan and Russia never signed a formal peace treaty ending World War II hostilities because of a long-running territorial dispute over the islands off Hokkaido, in northern Japan. The two countries signed a joint declaration in 1956 ending the state of war but have not signed an actual peace treaty.
Japan has sought to show a strong response to the Russian invasion alongside the Group of Seven major economies, particularly amid concerns that Russia’s invasion could embolden an increasingly assertive China, especially in regard to the self-ruled island of Taiwan that Beijing considers a breakaway province.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said Japan “strongly protested” Russia’s decision.
“The current situation has arisen completely as a result of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, and Russia’s response to try to shift this onto Japan-Russia relations is extremely unjustified and absolutely unacceptable,” Kishida said.
Tokyo and Moscow have held peace negotiations on and off since the 1956 declaration, most recently during the tenure of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who worked to improve relations with Russia. Abe, who stepped down in 2020, made the peace treaty and territorial settlement with Putin one of his diplomatic priorities. He met with Putin 27 times over eight years in an effort to make Moscow a strategic partner and keep it from drawing closer to China.
Since 2020, however, the bilateral relationship has cooled, as Russia has not altered its relations with China or its stance toward the territorial dispute with Japan that dates to World War II.
On Monday, shortly after the ministry’s announcement, the Russian Embassy in London tweeted a photo of the islands — which Japan claims and Russia occupies — using the Russian name for them.
In response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Tokyo has taken an increasingly assertive approach, ramping up sanctions, including by revoking Russia’s “most favored nation” trade status and targeting Russian financial institutions and elites.
Tokyo has pledged at least $100 million in emergency humanitarian assistance to Ukraine and taken the unusual step of accepting Ukrainian refugees. Japan also has begun shipping helmets and other nonlethal military gear, another extraordinary step by a country that has a self-imposed arms export ban because of its militaristic past.
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