#3871

EB: who ever goes will be risking their life for good, won't they? […] EB: couldn't i do it? EB: i am apparently immortal, because of this god tier business, so the bomb probably would not kill me! CG: OK, BUT DON'T YOU THINK THERE'S A REMOTE POSSIBILITY THAT GOING ON A SUICIDE MISSION TO SAVE ALL OF REALITY WOULD COUNT AS A HEROIC DEATH?

I’m still not convinced that Jack’s a reality-level threat.

Let's be honest; the majority of the kids' intel is ultimately derived from Scratch, and Scratch's primary goal is to summon Lord English. It seems a lot more likely to me that English is the reality-buster in the equation, and Jack is just a convenient scapegoat. Remember, Rose pressed Scratch on this exact question, and his argument for why Jack was the larger threat was very shaky.

Additionally, this entire Green Sun situation is starting to seem a little suspect. I originally thought that Scratch was engineering its destruction in order to destroy Snowman, but it's clear now that Slick will be ending her life in a much more direct manner. I guess Scratch could have multiple kill-Snowman plans – redundancy is smart, after all – but his omniscience should tell him which plan will succeed. As far as he's concerned, redundancy is, uh, redundant.

My point is that Scratch clearly doesn’t need to destroy the Sun to summon English. In fact, doing so seems exclusively bad for English, because it will deprive him of a powerful First Guardian minion. What's the deal here?

CG: JADE'S DREAM SELF IS DEAD TOO, SO SHE'S OUT. OR TO BE MORE SPECIFIC, HER DREAM SELF IS AN OVERLY EMOTIONAL DOG WHO WENT OFF WHIMPERING SOMEWHERE. I'M PRETTY SURE SHE WILL BE COMPLETELY USELESS.

Speaking of First Guardians, Jadesprite definitely has some important role to play here. She’s the most powerful hero on the board by far, and the only thing holding her back is her own mental state, which is sure to change eventually. That's what mental states do.

CG: I'VE TRIED TO TELL HER THAT HER SPRITE SELF IS PROBABLY NOWHERE NEAR AS DESPICABLE AS SHE'S MAKING OUT WITH HERSELF TO BE. CG: I MEAN CG: MAKING HERSELF OUT TO BE. […] EB: what i am getting from this, aside from the possibility that jade may or may not have kissed dog jade at some point, is that neither of them will be able to help with the bomb plan.

LMAO

Distant and ancient

Dotted across the sky in the constellation of Pictor (The Painter’s Easel) is the galaxy cluster highlighted here by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope: SPT-CL J0615-5746, or SPT0615 for short. First discovered by the South Pole Telescope less than a decade ago, SPT0615 is exceptional among the myriad clusters so far catalogued in our map of the Universe — it is the highest-redshift cluster for which a full, strong lens model is published.

SPT0615 is a massive cluster of galaxies, one of the farthest observed to cause gravitational lensing. Gravitational lensing occurs when light from a background object is deflected around mass between the object and the observer. Among the identified background objects, there is SPT0615-JD, a galaxy that is thought to have emerged just 500 million years after the Big Bang. This puts it among the very earliest structures to form in the Universe. It is also the farthest galaxy ever imaged by means of gravitational lensing.

Just as ancient paintings can tell us about the period of history in which they were painted, so too can ancient galaxies tell us about the era of the Universe in which they existed. To learn about cosmological history, astronomers explore the most distant reaches of the Universe, probing ever further out into the cosmos. The light from distant objects travels to us from so far away that it takes an immensely long time to reach us, meaning that it carries information from the past — information about the time at which it was emitted.

By studying such distant objects, astronomers are continuing to fill the gaps in our picture of what the very early Universe looked like, and uncover more about how it evolved into its current state.