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Comment by sega_sai | Hacker News Reader

Astronomer here. This is clearly an overhyped title. Sure JWST is great and a lot will hopefully come from it, but we don't need to overhype it. So far we learned from JWST that it is performing well, but no ground breaking results (but for sure they will come). (Tbh I stopped reading quanta because every time there is a news "X solved problem nobody thought could be solved" and titles like that.)

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Agreed. I'm cautiously optimistic that new science gets done soon, but so far, no existing science theories/data has been "reshaped".

I'm also hopeful that it doesn't get hit with any more micrometeoroids, because that risk is larger than expected and it will bring the party to a close much earlier than expected.

I think the machine itself, the comms, the general tech behind it is already groundbreaking enough to justify the title.

That would be a feat of engineering. Not astronomy

Isn't there enough credit to go around?

BTW, the people who work on these details inside astronomy are called "instrumentalists", whether they're scientists or engineers.

No, and it’s not a diminishing comment to suggest otherwise. It’s a great achievement. It’s not reshaping astronomy at this time.

I was hoping you would be interested in how the actual astronomy community thinks about it.

Few of them would agree with your statement.

I was hoping you wouldn’t throw in a passive aggressive sleight and cite some evidence if you’re saying in factually incorrect.

The appropriate levels of hype and/or excitement to discoveries in science and math are entirely subjective. You just aren’t as excited about it as their target audience.

I don't know, finding the oldest known galaxy ever is a pretty big one in my book. GLASS-z13 at the sprightly 13.4 billion light-years away.

I'd wait for spectroscopic confirmation before declaring this the most distant discovered galaxy.

Last I read about this (6 days ago), this was just a galaxy candidate, based on photometric measurements (not a spectrum).[0] It still could be some different type of object. The spectrum will give much more information.

It's exciting of this discovery pans out, and it's exactly the sort of thing JWST is supposed to find, but it's still too early to say that this object has been definitely determined to be a distant galaxy.

0. https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.09434

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