Looking back at 2021: week 2
Leaving January 6 behind, taking us into distant galaxies, while Luna loves tulips
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Yesterday, I picked the failed coup d'etat of the losers, on January 6, as the news for the first week of this year. Now I am tempted to continue on this theme. Week 2 will then be full of the emerging details in the days that followed. From there, I could effortlessly work through all this year's Trump-related news events, ending with the breaking news I saw this afternoon about the indictment of Steve Bannon by a federal grand jury.
I won't.
This project is just as new for me as it is for you and can go in different ways, but my idea is to show a wide variety of the news and events of this year. So let's move for the second week of 2021 away from the U.S. and politics. We can even go a step further and briefly move away from this planet, where we will likely return to tomorrow for most of the news of the past 50 weeks in the next 50 days.
ID2299
In week 2 of this year, astronomers announced that they had seen for the first time a dying galaxy while doing observations in Chile. At first, they were not particularly interested in the distant galaxy with the uninspiring name ID2299; a different survey of gold gas got all their attention. But they observed ID2299 for a few minutes, and that was enough to capture the tidal tail that emerged when the galaxy ejected almost half of the gas it uses to form stars.
Astronomers are not the kind of people that watch live events, their passion is to look into the past, and the further they look, the deeper they penetrate the history of the universe. Imagine this for a moment. The universe is some 14 billion years old. At the young age of only 4.5 billion years, ID2299 sadly passed away, and the image started to