NASA To Announce Some Big Thing Today at 1PM

Bear in mind, they did this a few months ago, and wound up announcing something that turned out to seem not-very-big at first, and then, when details were released, people began challenging their conclusions and the quality of their tests.

Cynics proposed their own theory: NASA knows the budget-cutters are eyeing them up and are attempting to make a public case for continued funding at current levels, and are rushing out big (?) stories to let the public know they're still Very Important.

They are making a fresh announcement, hyped as a window into the beginnings of the universe, but it seems it's just the discovery of the oldest galaxy ever seen, which is cool, certainly, but one of the galaxies we find has to be the oldest, right? So it's this one; it beats the old record.

But the old one was seriously old --

NASA hasn't revealed anything else about the discovery, but late last year Hubble sighted a galaxy scientists say dates back to when the earth was only 600 million years old.

So the new winner will be, well, even older than that. (It could just be they've decided that a particular star in that galaxy is the oldest star.)

This is cool stuff and I do like the Hubble and Kepler telescopes. (The Kepler has spotted like 400 exosolar planets in its short life -- pretty cool.)

It's not so much that I'm against any of this, but I am feeling annoyed that (it seems to me) they are deliberately trying to make headlines and I have to think the actual science is coming in a distant second to politics.

posted by Ace at 10:45 AM

| Access Comments