A new one for me - Leeja Miller
Jul 13, 2023
Fuckery With Purpose
There's no mystery about the student loan problem - or with Biden's difficulty in helping to get people out from under an unfair debt burden.
- Erosion of Real Wealth
- The near elimination of Labor's participation in Productivity Gains over the last 25 years
- Predatory lending practices
- GOP running interference for the lenders
In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, the federal government stopped requiring regular payments of student loan debt — a pause that has lasted more than three years. But student loan repayment had been dwindling for at least a decade before the pause.
You can imagine the stock of outstanding student debt as an overflowing bathtub: More students purchasing more undergraduate and advanced degrees at increasing tuition prices is the water gushing out of the faucet, and non-repayment is a blockage in the drain. The drain is blocked because despite what economists, policy-makers and educational administrators claim, a college degree doesn’t always “pay off.”
In recent years, many Americans with student loans weren’t making enough money to pay even the accumulating interest on their debt, let alone make progress on the principal. Wage stagnation is a long-running phenomenon that worsened after the Great Recession. But an important additional source of student loan misery is the widening and diversifying nature of the Americans who take them out. It’s increasingly the case that people who were always going to have low earnings no matter their educational attainment are also overloaded with student debt — think of underpaid teachers who acquired expensive master’s degrees for only a modest pay increase. The promise of higher education leading directly to high incomes is hollow.
Regardless of what happens after the scheduled resumption of payments in September and to the Biden administration’s plans for partial student debt forgiveness following the Supreme Court’s ruling in June, we predict that most of the outstanding balances — not to mention the roughly $100 billion in new loans issued every year — won’t ever be repaid. In the meantime, while the administration and the courts wrangle over the executive branch’s ability to waive student debt under existing law, student debtors feel forced to downsize their life plans. They delay or forgo marriage and family formation, homeownership, retirement and their children’s education: a profound failure of social reproduction.
Our student debt research uses credit reports, both from an annual, representative cross-section of student borrowers and from a single group of borrowers we’ve been following since 2009. We found that counterintuitively, the repayment pause was the best thing that ever happened to help student loans get repaid. That’s because in normal times, student debt balances mostly increase, thanks to monthly interest payments many borrowers are unable to keep up with. In 2020, 60.7 percent of outstanding student loans had a higher balance than when they were first issued. By 2022, that number had declined to 53.7 percent because interest was waived during the pandemic and some borrowers continued to pay down their principal.
The chart below compares repayment progress on loans in our 2020 cross-section with progress in 2022. The group with increasing balances shrank enormously during the repayment pause. Notably, Black and Latino borrowers had more loans with increasing balances before the pause; they benefit disproportionately while it remains in effect.
Student borrowers are not a monolithic group, and some demographic groups fare far better with their education debt than others. From the group of 2009-era debtors we’ve been following, we learned that female, Black and Latino borrowers generally saw their loan balances continue to increase above their 2009 level; male, white and Asian borrowers generally were able to make progress in paying their balances down (albeit not to zero — and the standard repayment term on federal loans is 10 years).
The diverging trajectories of Americans with student loans
On average, male, white and Asian borrowers made progress on their loans between 2009 and 2022. Female, Black and Latino borrowers had increasing balances until the repayment pause came into effect.
These divergent trajectories are due to structural inequalities in the labor market, which disadvantaged workers try to overcome with increased educational attainment. More advantaged workers don’t need to borrow as much to earn a decent salary and can start paying off the debt they do take on more quickly. The pandemic repayment pause changed the game, causing balances that had been increasing over the prior decade to start to fall. A student loan system in which borrowers do not generally repay their student loans during normal times, but in which they do repay them when they’re not required to, cannot be said to be functioning well.
This situation is the fruit of a tacit agreement among state legislatures, college administrators and the federal government dating back to the 1970s: defund public colleges and universities and shift them to a tuition-based revenue model, with the federal government backstopping the system with student debt so that more students can continue to obtain more expensive education. This change was justified by the idea that higher education “pays off” in the labor market.
Opportunities for middle-class employment without a college degree have certainly dwindled. But increasing the educational credentials required for any given job or salary doesn’t magically make pay go up. It just means the higher education system gets to take a larger slice of a worker’s lifetime earnings on the front end. And if the debt can’t be repaid, taxpayers swallow the loss on the back end — but only after the borrower has endured years of mounting balances and their negative consequences for wealth accumulation and creditworthiness.
This odd structure — in which federal funding comes in the form of student loans that won’t ever be repaid, as opposed to direct funding of colleges and universities — lets school administrators off the regulatory hook. In theory, the market of students selecting their preferred college experience is supposed to discipline schools’ financial conduct. In reality, it does not. This is why college administrators resist free-college proposals that amount to direct federal funding in return for capping tuition: They fear their socioeconomically segregated business models wouldn’t survive the regulatory scrutiny attached to those dollars.
The $1.7 trillion tower of mostly unrepayable student debt is a symbol of education policy failure. Unfortunately, politicians in both parties seem unable to think outside the neoliberal box that got us here. Republicans in Congress have proposed limits to federal loans, barring students from the system once their balances reach a certain threshold. That is an exclusionary vision that seeks to return higher education to its pre-G.I. Bill status as a bastion of white privilege for a tiny elite.
You can imagine the stock of outstanding student debt as an overflowing bathtub: More students purchasing more undergraduate and advanced degrees at increasing tuition prices is the water gushing out of the faucet, and non-repayment is a blockage in the drain. The drain is blocked because despite what economists, policy-makers and educational administrators claim, a college degree doesn’t always “pay off.”
In recent years, many Americans with student loans weren’t making enough money to pay even the accumulating interest on their debt, let alone make progress on the principal. Wage stagnation is a long-running phenomenon that worsened after the Great Recession. But an important additional source of student loan misery is the widening and diversifying nature of the Americans who take them out. It’s increasingly the case that people who were always going to have low earnings no matter their educational attainment are also overloaded with student debt — think of underpaid teachers who acquired expensive master’s degrees for only a modest pay increase. The promise of higher education leading directly to high incomes is hollow.
Regardless of what happens after the scheduled resumption of payments in September and to the Biden administration’s plans for partial student debt forgiveness following the Supreme Court’s ruling in June, we predict that most of the outstanding balances — not to mention the roughly $100 billion in new loans issued every year — won’t ever be repaid. In the meantime, while the administration and the courts wrangle over the executive branch’s ability to waive student debt under existing law, student debtors feel forced to downsize their life plans. They delay or forgo marriage and family formation, homeownership, retirement and their children’s education: a profound failure of social reproduction.
Our student debt research uses credit reports, both from an annual, representative cross-section of student borrowers and from a single group of borrowers we’ve been following since 2009. We found that counterintuitively, the repayment pause was the best thing that ever happened to help student loans get repaid. That’s because in normal times, student debt balances mostly increase, thanks to monthly interest payments many borrowers are unable to keep up with. In 2020, 60.7 percent of outstanding student loans had a higher balance than when they were first issued. By 2022, that number had declined to 53.7 percent because interest was waived during the pandemic and some borrowers continued to pay down their principal.
The chart below compares repayment progress on loans in our 2020 cross-section with progress in 2022. The group with increasing balances shrank enormously during the repayment pause. Notably, Black and Latino borrowers had more loans with increasing balances before the pause; they benefit disproportionately while it remains in effect.
Student borrowers are not a monolithic group, and some demographic groups fare far better with their education debt than others. From the group of 2009-era debtors we’ve been following, we learned that female, Black and Latino borrowers generally saw their loan balances continue to increase above their 2009 level; male, white and Asian borrowers generally were able to make progress in paying their balances down (albeit not to zero — and the standard repayment term on federal loans is 10 years).
The diverging trajectories of Americans with student loans
On average, male, white and Asian borrowers made progress on their loans between 2009 and 2022. Female, Black and Latino borrowers had increasing balances until the repayment pause came into effect.
These divergent trajectories are due to structural inequalities in the labor market, which disadvantaged workers try to overcome with increased educational attainment. More advantaged workers don’t need to borrow as much to earn a decent salary and can start paying off the debt they do take on more quickly. The pandemic repayment pause changed the game, causing balances that had been increasing over the prior decade to start to fall. A student loan system in which borrowers do not generally repay their student loans during normal times, but in which they do repay them when they’re not required to, cannot be said to be functioning well.
This situation is the fruit of a tacit agreement among state legislatures, college administrators and the federal government dating back to the 1970s: defund public colleges and universities and shift them to a tuition-based revenue model, with the federal government backstopping the system with student debt so that more students can continue to obtain more expensive education. This change was justified by the idea that higher education “pays off” in the labor market.
Opportunities for middle-class employment without a college degree have certainly dwindled. But increasing the educational credentials required for any given job or salary doesn’t magically make pay go up. It just means the higher education system gets to take a larger slice of a worker’s lifetime earnings on the front end. And if the debt can’t be repaid, taxpayers swallow the loss on the back end — but only after the borrower has endured years of mounting balances and their negative consequences for wealth accumulation and creditworthiness.
This odd structure — in which federal funding comes in the form of student loans that won’t ever be repaid, as opposed to direct funding of colleges and universities — lets school administrators off the regulatory hook. In theory, the market of students selecting their preferred college experience is supposed to discipline schools’ financial conduct. In reality, it does not. This is why college administrators resist free-college proposals that amount to direct federal funding in return for capping tuition: They fear their socioeconomically segregated business models wouldn’t survive the regulatory scrutiny attached to those dollars.
The $1.7 trillion tower of mostly unrepayable student debt is a symbol of education policy failure. Unfortunately, politicians in both parties seem unable to think outside the neoliberal box that got us here. Republicans in Congress have proposed limits to federal loans, barring students from the system once their balances reach a certain threshold. That is an exclusionary vision that seeks to return higher education to its pre-G.I. Bill status as a bastion of white privilege for a tiny elite.
And there's that razor blade.
The Biden administration proposes to regulate (some) colleges based on whether their students can eventually repay their student loans and to force all programs to disclose post-graduation earnings and debt burden before students enroll. Those proposals cling to the idea that the labor market is where the value of an education is ultimately determined. Colleges can convincingly object that they don’t control their students’ lives after graduation and would be penalized for enrolling needier students.
So, NYT, Biden shouldn't go for a little tempering regulation because the people who're acting all shitty now would act shitty?
To get a handle on the student debt crisis, the government will eventually have to redesign its relationship with American higher education. The current era of tuition-based revenue models has colleges competing for the students who can pay full freight, which can relegate the neediest students to the least-resourced institutions. A healthier system would look more homogenous, with students from all over the income scale spread across institutions nationwide, instead of being an elite scramble between students and schools to fill a few open seats at the top.
IDK what the fuck you're talking about, NYT. And I have no idea why you seem to think the Republicans are suddenly going to reverse themselves and get all cuddly with a Dept Of Education that they've been actively and publicly trying to kill for 25 years.
What political system are you even watching?
To get there, the Department of Education should make institution-level eligibility for federal student loans contingent on a uniform, very low cost of attendance for undergraduates and affordable tuition levels for professional programs. The structure of federal student loans should reflect society’s long-term needs, not just those of employers and universities preying on the generosity of the student loan program and of students desperate for jobs in an economy that feels ever more winner-take-all.
One way of ensuring and backstopping those policy goals could be the creation of a new federal university system, in which the campuses would be homogeneous in terms of financial and other resources and the student bodies socioeconomically diverse, rather than the other way around. But it’s more comfortable and politically convenient to continue to fight the culture war over higher education than to confront the facts about the causes and consequences of this ugly mountain of student debt. The Supreme Court has ruled. The Biden administration is searching for a new way forward. It’s time for a change of course.
Today's Reddit
Yes - let's go ahead and concentrate that segment of the population - establish some kind of camp for them.
Oy.
"Moms for Liberty activist wants LGBTQ students separated into special classes" (not cool bro)
by u/KyloRenKardashian in WhitePeopleTwitter
Looks A Little Rough
I mean the guy's pushin' 80, but ...
Is he unwell?
Is the pressure getting to him?
Did his hair-n-makeup lady quit?
Maybe it's just a bad angle.
Jul 12, 2023
A Quote
Between what is said, and not meant -
and what is meant, but not said -
most of love is lost.
--Kahlil Gibran
Today's Reddit
It makes my head hurt sometimes.
You're free to express your views, and not have the government arrest you for it.
But no right is absolute or unlimited. We got rules, dummy.
That said, there are legal rules, there are civility rules, and there are jungle rules. So you're free to use the language however you feel the need - and then you're free to smash your face into somebody's fist.
Freedom of speech in the eyes of a Chinese student
by u/bwwsscnm3 in ThatsInsane
And There It Is
We're coming up on 3 weeks since Gen Surovikin was seen in public.
My crystal ball has been in the shop since I got the friggin' thing, but I'm thinking the odds that the guy is still in one piece are getting pretty slim.
Gen. Sergei Surovikin, the commander of the Russian Aerospace Forces, has not been seen in public since a short-lived mutiny of mercenaries on June 24.
Gen. Sergei Surovikin of Russia, a onetime ally of the Wagner chief who hasn’t been seen publicly since a short-lived mutiny last month, is “taking a rest,” one of the country’s top lawmakers said Wednesday, when pressed by a reporter.
“He is unavailable right now,” the lawmaker, Andrei Kartapolov, the head of the Russian Duma’s defense committee, added in a video posted on the Telegram messaging app before hurrying away from the reporter.
General Surovikin, the chief of the Russian Aerospace Forces, was considered to be an ally of Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner mercenary company, whose forces mounted the brief insurrection in June aimed at toppling Russia’s military leadership, before standing down in a deal with the Kremlin.
In the days since then, intense speculation has surrounded General Surovikin, who skillfully pulled out Russian forces from Kherson amid Ukraine’s counteroffensive last year and has often been dubbed “General Armageddon” for his ruthless tactics.
The New York Times reported that U.S. officials believe General Surovikin had advance knowledge of the mutiny but do not know whether he participated. In the hours after the rebellion began, the Russian authorities quickly released a video of the general calling on the Wagner fighters to stand down. He hasn’t been seen in public since.
In the video, General Gerasimov was receiving a report from the Russian Aerospace Forces, which are run by General Surovikin. But the person giving the update in the footage was General Surovikin’s deputy, Col. Gen. Viktor Afzalov.
General Surovkin’s location is just one of the many mysteries that have arisen since the mutiny. Despite a deal announced by the Kremlin, under which Mr. Prigozhin would depart Russia for Belarus and avoid prosecution, the mercenary tycoon appears to remain in Russia.
The Kremlin disclosed earlier this week that Mr. Prigozhin and his top commanders met with President Vladimir V. Putin five days after the mutiny, raising many questions about what sort of deal had been struck with the former insurrectionists.
According to the Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, during the meeting the fighters pledged their loyalty to Mr. Putin, who in turn discussed “further employment options and further combat uses” for the Wagner fighters. Mr. Peskov did not give any additional details of what was agreed to.
General Surovikin led Russian forces in Syria while Mr. Prigozhin’s Wagner group fought there. When Moscow appointed General Surovikin to lead Russian forces in Ukraine last year, Mr. Prigozhin praised him as the best commander in the Russian military.
But in January, Mr. Putin transferred command of Ukraine operations to General Gerasimov, handing the reins to someone Mr. Prigozhin regularly pilloried as an incompetent paper-pusher.
Mr. Prigozhin said his revolt was aimed at getting rid of General Gerasimov and his counterpart, Defense Minister Sergei K. Shoigu. Mr. Shoigu has made many appearances in public in the days since the uprising, in what has been interpreted as a sign of Mr. Putin’s endorsement.
The questions about General Surovikin’s whereabouts came as another incident roiled the ranks of the Russian military.
A former Russian submarine commander, Stanislav Rzhitsky, who had been serving as the deputy director of Krasnodar’s mobilization office, was found gunned down in the southern Russian city early this week.
On Tuesday, the day after the body was found, Ukrainian military intelligence said on its official Telegram account that Rzhitsky had commanded a submarine that was involved in missile attacks on Ukraine.
Today's Nerd Thing
The JWST has been in place and functional for a year, and we're getting our money's worth.
JWST keeps finding cosmic gems, black holes and surprising galaxies
NASA is marking the anniversary of the James Webb Space Telescope’s scientific debut with the release of a spectacular new image
The James Webb Space Telescope was designed to tunnel deeper into space and farther back in time than any previous observatory, with the audacious goal of seeing the very first galaxies that lit up the young universe. Creating pretty pictures was always a pleasant but ancillary feature of having this amazing new piece of hardware out in space.
Today, 365 days after NASA unveiled the mission’s first batch of data and images, it’s clear that the JWST can produce the hard science and the beauty shots with equal aplomb. NASA is marking the first anniversary of the JWST’s scientific debut with the release of a new image, demonstrating the telescope’s ability to re-envision the universe. The dramatic, somewhat hallucinatory image captures the dynamism of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth, where planetary systems like our own could be in the initial stages of forming.
“The telescope is working better than we could have possibly hoped for,” said NASA astrophysicist Jane Rigby, who earlier this month became the senior project scientist for the JWST.
The scientific community was a little conservative in planning their agenda for the first year of observations, but this next year of science will take full advantage of what the telescope can do, Rigby said. “We’re getting bolder in year two.”
The JWST’s journey around the sun has not been without speed bumps. The first year of scientific operations included a brief pause in data collection for safety reasons and a heart-stopping collision with space dust that forced project managers to fly the observatory more or less backward from now on.
But the scientists working with the telescope’s downloaded data are thrilled by its performance as it peers into the infrared portion of the spectrum, gathering light that can’t be collected by its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope.
The big headline so far is that the JWST has seen lots of surprisingly bright galaxies in the early universe. This proved to be a bit befuddling.
No, the JWST did not disprove the big bang theory. Cosmology has not gone the way of phrenology. But the observations of so much light coming from the early period of galaxy formation led to a lot of head-scratching. Observation and theory have not been perfectly aligned.
“I think there is a tension,” said physicist Massimo Stiavelli, the JWST mission head at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. “This is undeniable, because things are different from what we thought they would be.”
The JWST was conceived in the late 1980s as the successor to the yet-to-launch Hubble, but suffered many years of delays and near-death encounters with budget-minded lawmakers. It’s a $10 billion investment. It is not designed with the kind of modular features that would enable replacement parts if something went screwy.
Also it’s way out in deep space, in a gravitationally stable orbit around the sun called L2 that keeps it roughly a million miles from Earth. NASA doesn’t currently have spaceships to carry astronauts to L2 and back.
All this reinforces the joy among scientists that the telescope works as planned.
For a telescope of this design, a year is a big deal. The telescope’s mirrors have to remain extremely cold and can’t be pointed anywhere near the sun, so don’t expect to see any pretty JWST images of Venus. But a full orbit gives the telescope a chance to cover most of the universe.
JWST, which launched on Christmas morning 2021, has actually made one-and-a-half orbits, but the first six months were devoted to deploying its huge array of gold-coated hexagonal mirrors and a sprawling sun shade to keep them cool, as well as fine-tuning its instruments.
The light gathered by those mirrors carries information about multiple layers of the universe, from the farthest, dimmest, barely perceptible galaxies to more flamboyant galaxies in the foreground and star-forming clouds of dust and gas within our own Milky Way. And it’s looked at our immediate neighborhood, the solar system, returning poster-worthy pictures of Jupiter and Saturn that are jammed with scientific data.
The early universe is where the JWST has done its most interesting and, at times, puzzling investigations. The goal is to understand how the early universe evolved, how galaxies formed and how we got to where we are — on a planet orbiting a star on one of the spiral arms of a large galaxy.
“Our home is the Milky Way,” said Brant Robertson, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of California at Santa Cruz. “That is a galaxy. It’s a beautiful galaxy. We can take pictures from the inside. But it begs the question: How did it get here? How did it form?”
This cosmic archaeology is why the JWST was built in the first place. One strange feature of the universe is that light is eternal. It gets fainter but it’s still there, including the most ancient light, heavily shifted into the infrared portion of the spectrum by the expansion of space that’s been happening since the big bang. Astrophysicists can use the JWST to scan for extremely high-redshift galaxies, digging ever deeper into the past.
Robertson co-wrote one of two recent papers that describe the most distant galaxy yet detected and confirmed by the JWST, named JADES-GS-Z13-0. It was found at redshift 13.2, which corresponds to about 320 million years after the big bang. There are claims of possible galaxies at higher redshifts, but they await confirmation, he said.
Asked what the galaxy looks like, he said: “It’s a smudge.”
But what if you could somehow get in a spacecraft and transport yourself through various wormholes into the distant past and hover right next to that galaxy. Then what would it look like?
“If you could be right up next to it, the galaxy itself would be very blue to your eyes, because it’s forming stars,” Robertson said. “It would be a very blue sparkler in the early universe.”
A puzzle about early galaxies
Right away, astronomers looking at the JWST data on the early universe spotted something that defied expectations: a lot of oddly bright galaxies.
Brightness is an approximation for mass. Very bright galaxies, therefore, would normally be assumed to be very massive. But galaxies need time to grow. The theorists had previously worked out a general timeline for the evolution of early galaxies, and the ones detected by the JWST look at first glance remarkably mature for their age.
The JWST may be telling scientists that galaxy formation in the early universe was somehow more efficient than previously known.
“There’s some tweaking we need to do in our theories for how those very early galaxies formed and grew their stars,” said Jeyhan Kartaltepe, an astrophysicist at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
“Nothing we’ve seen makes me think we’ve broken cosmology,” Rigby said. “What it is telling us is that galaxies got their act together earlier than we gave them credit for.”
Counterintuitively for those of us who are not astrophysicists, black holes could be another factor in the luminosity of those early galaxies. Although by definition a black hole is a structure with such an intense gravity field that even light cannot escape, the region around a black hole can glow as gas and dust become superheated falling toward the event horizon.
Last year Rebecca Larson, at that time still a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, saw something peculiar as she scrutinized data from an extremely distant galaxy named CEERS 1019. It emitted that light more than 13 billion years ago — back when the universe was just getting rolling, and galaxies were small, ill-formed gaggles of hot, young, bright-blue stars.
Larson was puzzled by the unusually bright light coming from the core of CEERS 1019. “What the heck is this?” she thought.
What she guessed it to be — correctly — is a supermassive black hole. The galaxy, though young, had already managed to grow a black hole that scientists estimate to have a mass equal to 10 million suns. A report from Larson and her colleagues describe this as the earliest active supermassive black hole ever detected.
Excitement over exoplanets
What the past year has also started to show is that the JWST is, in the words of astrophysicist Garth Illingworth, a “spectroscopic powerhouse.” It has proved to be spectacular at picking through the spectra of the light it gathers, which carries information about the object being observed.
That ability yielded one of the telescope’s first major discoveries: carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a giant planet, WASP 39b, orbiting a distant star. The planet itself isn’t visible with current technology. But as it passes in front of, or behind, its parent star, the changes in starlight encode information about the atmosphere of the planet.
Until the JWST, no one had made a definitive detection of carbon dioxide in an exoplanet’s atmosphere, said Knicole Colon, a NASA astrophysicist.
“The first time we saw the spectral signature of that feature, it was just beautiful,” she said. “It hit us in the face. Here’s this whopping signal, which was fantastic.”
To be clear, scientists looking at spectra are looking at graphical presentations of data, not actual images. Larson, who found the supermassive black hole, was so transfixed by the spectral signature of a central bright region in that galaxy that, as she put it, “I never thought to go look at the actual images from JWST.”
That’s when Kartaltepe showed her the image of the galaxy obtained by the telescope. Strikingly, the galaxy had three bright spots, with a particularly bright spot right in the middle. That was Larson’s supermassive black hole.
“I just started crying,” she said.
Rho Ophiuchi, the star-forming region closest to Earth
NASA is marking the anniversary of the James Webb Space Telescope’s scientific debut with the release of a spectacular new image
The James Webb Space Telescope was designed to tunnel deeper into space and farther back in time than any previous observatory, with the audacious goal of seeing the very first galaxies that lit up the young universe. Creating pretty pictures was always a pleasant but ancillary feature of having this amazing new piece of hardware out in space.
Today, 365 days after NASA unveiled the mission’s first batch of data and images, it’s clear that the JWST can produce the hard science and the beauty shots with equal aplomb. NASA is marking the first anniversary of the JWST’s scientific debut with the release of a new image, demonstrating the telescope’s ability to re-envision the universe. The dramatic, somewhat hallucinatory image captures the dynamism of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth, where planetary systems like our own could be in the initial stages of forming.
“The telescope is working better than we could have possibly hoped for,” said NASA astrophysicist Jane Rigby, who earlier this month became the senior project scientist for the JWST.
The scientific community was a little conservative in planning their agenda for the first year of observations, but this next year of science will take full advantage of what the telescope can do, Rigby said. “We’re getting bolder in year two.”
The JWST’s journey around the sun has not been without speed bumps. The first year of scientific operations included a brief pause in data collection for safety reasons and a heart-stopping collision with space dust that forced project managers to fly the observatory more or less backward from now on.
But the scientists working with the telescope’s downloaded data are thrilled by its performance as it peers into the infrared portion of the spectrum, gathering light that can’t be collected by its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope.
The big headline so far is that the JWST has seen lots of surprisingly bright galaxies in the early universe. This proved to be a bit befuddling.
No, the JWST did not disprove the big bang theory. Cosmology has not gone the way of phrenology. But the observations of so much light coming from the early period of galaxy formation led to a lot of head-scratching. Observation and theory have not been perfectly aligned.
“I think there is a tension,” said physicist Massimo Stiavelli, the JWST mission head at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. “This is undeniable, because things are different from what we thought they would be.”
The JWST was conceived in the late 1980s as the successor to the yet-to-launch Hubble, but suffered many years of delays and near-death encounters with budget-minded lawmakers. It’s a $10 billion investment. It is not designed with the kind of modular features that would enable replacement parts if something went screwy.
Also it’s way out in deep space, in a gravitationally stable orbit around the sun called L2 that keeps it roughly a million miles from Earth. NASA doesn’t currently have spaceships to carry astronauts to L2 and back.
All this reinforces the joy among scientists that the telescope works as planned.
For a telescope of this design, a year is a big deal. The telescope’s mirrors have to remain extremely cold and can’t be pointed anywhere near the sun, so don’t expect to see any pretty JWST images of Venus. But a full orbit gives the telescope a chance to cover most of the universe.
JWST, which launched on Christmas morning 2021, has actually made one-and-a-half orbits, but the first six months were devoted to deploying its huge array of gold-coated hexagonal mirrors and a sprawling sun shade to keep them cool, as well as fine-tuning its instruments.
The light gathered by those mirrors carries information about multiple layers of the universe, from the farthest, dimmest, barely perceptible galaxies to more flamboyant galaxies in the foreground and star-forming clouds of dust and gas within our own Milky Way. And it’s looked at our immediate neighborhood, the solar system, returning poster-worthy pictures of Jupiter and Saturn that are jammed with scientific data.
The early universe is where the JWST has done its most interesting and, at times, puzzling investigations. The goal is to understand how the early universe evolved, how galaxies formed and how we got to where we are — on a planet orbiting a star on one of the spiral arms of a large galaxy.
“Our home is the Milky Way,” said Brant Robertson, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of California at Santa Cruz. “That is a galaxy. It’s a beautiful galaxy. We can take pictures from the inside. But it begs the question: How did it get here? How did it form?”
This cosmic archaeology is why the JWST was built in the first place. One strange feature of the universe is that light is eternal. It gets fainter but it’s still there, including the most ancient light, heavily shifted into the infrared portion of the spectrum by the expansion of space that’s been happening since the big bang. Astrophysicists can use the JWST to scan for extremely high-redshift galaxies, digging ever deeper into the past.
Robertson co-wrote one of two recent papers that describe the most distant galaxy yet detected and confirmed by the JWST, named JADES-GS-Z13-0. It was found at redshift 13.2, which corresponds to about 320 million years after the big bang. There are claims of possible galaxies at higher redshifts, but they await confirmation, he said.
Asked what the galaxy looks like, he said: “It’s a smudge.”
But what if you could somehow get in a spacecraft and transport yourself through various wormholes into the distant past and hover right next to that galaxy. Then what would it look like?
“If you could be right up next to it, the galaxy itself would be very blue to your eyes, because it’s forming stars,” Robertson said. “It would be a very blue sparkler in the early universe.”
A puzzle about early galaxies
Right away, astronomers looking at the JWST data on the early universe spotted something that defied expectations: a lot of oddly bright galaxies.
Brightness is an approximation for mass. Very bright galaxies, therefore, would normally be assumed to be very massive. But galaxies need time to grow. The theorists had previously worked out a general timeline for the evolution of early galaxies, and the ones detected by the JWST look at first glance remarkably mature for their age.
The JWST may be telling scientists that galaxy formation in the early universe was somehow more efficient than previously known.
“There’s some tweaking we need to do in our theories for how those very early galaxies formed and grew their stars,” said Jeyhan Kartaltepe, an astrophysicist at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
“Nothing we’ve seen makes me think we’ve broken cosmology,” Rigby said. “What it is telling us is that galaxies got their act together earlier than we gave them credit for.”
Counterintuitively for those of us who are not astrophysicists, black holes could be another factor in the luminosity of those early galaxies. Although by definition a black hole is a structure with such an intense gravity field that even light cannot escape, the region around a black hole can glow as gas and dust become superheated falling toward the event horizon.
Last year Rebecca Larson, at that time still a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, saw something peculiar as she scrutinized data from an extremely distant galaxy named CEERS 1019. It emitted that light more than 13 billion years ago — back when the universe was just getting rolling, and galaxies were small, ill-formed gaggles of hot, young, bright-blue stars.
Larson was puzzled by the unusually bright light coming from the core of CEERS 1019. “What the heck is this?” she thought.
What she guessed it to be — correctly — is a supermassive black hole. The galaxy, though young, had already managed to grow a black hole that scientists estimate to have a mass equal to 10 million suns. A report from Larson and her colleagues describe this as the earliest active supermassive black hole ever detected.
Excitement over exoplanets
What the past year has also started to show is that the JWST is, in the words of astrophysicist Garth Illingworth, a “spectroscopic powerhouse.” It has proved to be spectacular at picking through the spectra of the light it gathers, which carries information about the object being observed.
That ability yielded one of the telescope’s first major discoveries: carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a giant planet, WASP 39b, orbiting a distant star. The planet itself isn’t visible with current technology. But as it passes in front of, or behind, its parent star, the changes in starlight encode information about the atmosphere of the planet.
Until the JWST, no one had made a definitive detection of carbon dioxide in an exoplanet’s atmosphere, said Knicole Colon, a NASA astrophysicist.
“The first time we saw the spectral signature of that feature, it was just beautiful,” she said. “It hit us in the face. Here’s this whopping signal, which was fantastic.”
To be clear, scientists looking at spectra are looking at graphical presentations of data, not actual images. Larson, who found the supermassive black hole, was so transfixed by the spectral signature of a central bright region in that galaxy that, as she put it, “I never thought to go look at the actual images from JWST.”
That’s when Kartaltepe showed her the image of the galaxy obtained by the telescope. Strikingly, the galaxy had three bright spots, with a particularly bright spot right in the middle. That was Larson’s supermassive black hole.
“I just started crying,” she said.
Jul 11, 2023
Praising By Faint Damnation
And Tommy Tuberville may not be the racist asshole he seems to be, but there're lots of people who wear the label "Racist Asshole" like a merit badge, and they all think he's one of their own.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) said that the definition of a “white nationalist” is a matter of “opinion” during a television interview Monday night in which he was given the opportunity to clarify remarks from this spring, when he appeared to be advocating for white nationalists to serve in the U.S. military.
During the CNN interview, Tuberville repeatedly said that he rejects racism but pushed back against host Kaitlan Collins when she told him that by definition white nationalists are racist because they believe their race is superior to others. Tuberville at one point in the back and forth characterized white nationalists as people who hold “a few probably different beliefs.”
The interview resurrected another controversy for the first-term senator, who has been in the news mostly for stalling scores of senior military nominations in an attempt to stop a Defense Department policy that helps ensure access to abortions for service members and their families.
In a May interview with a local public radio station in Alabama, Tuberville, a former football coach, criticized Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin for his efforts “to get out the white extremists, the white nationalists” from the military. Tuberville said it was part of an effort to politicize the armed services and accused Pentagon leaders of “ruining our military” and driving away supporters of former president Donald Trump.Asked to clarify his comments on white nationalists in the military, Sen. Tommy Tuberville's response: pic.twitter.com/deTfS4XKnR
— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) July 11, 2023
Tuberville subsequently told reporters that he looks “at a white nationalist as a Trump Republican,” adding: “That’s what we’re called all the time.”
Defending white nationalists, Tommy Tuberville fears a military that is ‘going wrong’
On Monday night, Collins pressed Tuberville on whether white nationalists should be allowed to serve in the military, offering a definition of a white nationalist as someone who “believes that the white race is superior to other races.”
“Well that’s some people’s opinion,” Tuberville said.
Asked for his opinion, Tuberville said: “My opinion of a white nationalist, if someone wants to call them white nationalist, to me, is an American. It’s an American. Now if that white nationalist is a racist, I’m totally against anything that they want to do because I am 110 percent against racism.”
Tuberville then accused Democrats of using the term to push “identity politics,” which he said is “ruining this country.”
Collins continued to press Tuberville on whether white nationalists should be able to serve in the military, saying they are people who believe “horrific things.”
“Well that’s just a name that has been given,” Tuberville said of white nationalism.
Collins told him, “it’s a real definition.”
“If you’re going to do away with most White people in this country out the military, we’ve got huge problems,” Tuberville responded.
“It’s not people who are White. It’s white nationalists,” Collins said.
“That have a few probably different beliefs, they have different beliefs,” Tuberville said. “Now if racism is one of those beliefs, I’m totally against it. I’m totally against racism.”
Earlier in the interview, Tuberville cited his coaching experience at Auburn University and elsewhere.
“I was a football coach for 40 years and had the opportunity to be around more minorities than anybody up on this Hill,” Tuberville said.
“A white nationalist is racist, senator,” Collins said.
“Well that’s your opinion, that’s your opinion,” Tuberville said.
He added: “I’m totally against any type of racism.”
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “[w]hite nationalist groups espouse white supremacist or white separatist ideologies, often focusing on the alleged inferiority of nonwhite persons.”
“Their primary goal is to create a white ethnostate,” the group says on its website. “Groups listed in a variety of other categories, including Ku Klux Klan, neo-Confederate, neo-Nazi, racist skinhead and Christian Identity, could also be fairly described as white nationalist.”
Military leaders have long worried about extremist views in their ranks.
A study by the Center for Strategic International Studies found that 6.4 percent of all domestic terror incidents in 2020 involved active-duty or reserve personnel, more than quadrupling the tally from the previous year. Hate groups actively target troops to become recruits while encouraging their own extremists to join the military ranks.
The presence of many military veterans at the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol further alarmed senior Pentagon officials and prompted Austin to create a counter-extremism working group in April 2021.
BTW, WaPo - maybe you could ask the Senator to name a kind of politics that isn't "identity politics".
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)