Here is the Leda galaxy, “twin” of the Milky Way (which is a billion light years from us) – Corriere.it

Astronomers had warned us since the opening of its cryogenic lenses in 2022 a million and a half kilometers from here: the James Webb Space Telescope, the most powerful observation instrument of the universe ever designed and built by humanity, would forever change our knowledge and perhaps even our position in the skies : we are, less and less, a unicum (as we have believed for millennia). After the punctual observation of some exoplanets (in fact with characteristics similar to the Earth and therefore potentially habitable) we can now admire Leda2046648, a galaxy similar to ours, the Milky Way, but a billion light years away from us.

Not its first twin: because the Milky Way already had a twin, the Andromeda galaxy (or M31). Leda is located in the Constellation of Hercules, a handkerchief of the sky that the powerful eye glimpsed again in the warming up phases, last May. After the first images that had been made public by NASA of deepest space, over 13 billion years ago, a handful of hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang itself, the wonder seemed to have reached its peak. But for astronomers and sky scientists how to live in a new technological age. As if we had passed from the steam loom to the use of electricity in factories.

The talent of the James Webb Space Telescope the deep investigation, the detail he can see thanks to the infrared spectrum (in fact we shouldn’t think of photographs as we vacationers understand them, but of images reconstructed by computers thanks to the incredible amount of data that the telescope recovers). For this we are going back in time, towards the origins of the cosmos. If we take for example the distance of Leda from our Milky Way, one billion light yearswe find what we are now seeing the clear but ancient imprint left by the galaxy when the first multicellular organism was emerging on Earth. Its light took a billion years to make its way to the lens of the James Webb Telescope.

(Below the episode of Invisible Geniuses, Massimo Sideri’s podcast on forgotten Italian discoveries, dedicated to the birth of the myth of Mars, with the space architect of MIT Valentina
Sumini, here the complete series)

Considering that the entire Universe has about 13.7-13.8 billion years of life we understand what values ​​we are talking about. That galaxy could explode today, and it would take us another billion years to find out. A detail that reminds us how much our perception of time is on a human life scale, of generations at most, but insignificant due to natural events. as if paleontologists from the sky had discovered a perfectly preserved fossil of a species never observed before.

The telescope’s image of our new sister in the Universe it also reminds us that while we are all wondering about the effects of artificial intelligence in our daily lives by trying or trying to try ChatGPT, there is another technology that is a million and a half kilometers away from us (to avoid any form of light pollution and powders) that works for us. Maybe it will be the year of ChatGPT. But every now and then let’s remember to go and see what the James Webb Space Telescope is looking for us in the deep Universe. Also because it is worth remembering that all of this started with a man who had the courage to raise this same technology towards the sky: Galileo Galilei.