James Webb spots the early galaxies responsible for tidying up the universe If you didn't already know, it may surprise you to discover that space wasn't always clear. Quite the opposite, in fact. Space – or at least the gas between stars and galaxies – was opaque in the early days of the universe. The gas later became transparent and energetic starlight could then penetrate it. Thanks to the James …
This sounds like a confirmation of evidence about the creation on the universe and is pretty much exactly what the early Big Bang theory work was saying happened.
Picking this comment's icon from El Reg's choices reminded me of the religious views that God created everything. Thanks El Reg (LOL).
There is something wrong here. The universe became transparent during the era of recombination, which preceded the era of reionization. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recombination_(cosmology) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reionization . It only stayed transparent after the ionization because it had vastly expanded and the gas/plasma was now spread very thin. Nowhere in its published papers does EIGER suggest anything different.
Yet that NASA guy somehow got the idea that, "The researchers ... showed that the galaxies are generally surrounded by transparent regions about 2 million light-years in radius. In other words, Webb witnessed galaxies in the process of clearing the space around them," leading our Vulture to talk of "Ionization began ... heating the cooled, dense, opaque and light-absorbing gas that filled the universe." Because it didn't.
What we can say is that the result of recombination was a "dark" universe in the sense that it did not emit much radiation, and what the new stars and galaxies did was to pour out stuff that EIGER could actually detect. It is only in this sense that the gaps between the bubbles are "dark". Maybe someone at NASA misread that "dark" and thought it meant "opaque", whatever.
"What in the name of the Deity is an "honoree"?"
It's something like an "honouree" only shorter and more USofAn.
It's someone being honoured for something, or something taking the honour of being something. For example, a dark region of the cosmos being
"honoured" for being the biggest collapsed object so far found.
Though I would not call that an honour, more like recognition of it's place on a list, which is just one random property of an object.
It's like honouring (or "honoring" if you are USofAn) a girl for being the one with the reddest hair. Only less significant and probably temporary.
