The Deal With Eric Lerner Saying the Big Bang Didn’t Happen

The Deal With Eric Lerner Saying the Big Bang Didn’t Happen

Subject :Science and Technology

Section: Space Science

CONTEXT:After NASA released the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope, Eric J. Lerner repeated his infamous claim that the Big Bang didn’t really happen.

• The images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) never fail to impress people anywhere in the world. Even those who usually have their eyes glued to cynical primetime debates on news channels on the TV spared a minute or two to behold those spectacular images, like that of the SMACS 0723 galaxy cluster
• Scientists recently spectroscopically confirmed the presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a hot gas-giant planet orbiting a Sun-like star some 700 light years away, thanks to JWST.
• Fred Hoyle, the astrophysicist famous for explaining how fusion reactions in stars create chemical elements, advanced the steady state theory, the only serious rival theory to the Big Bang theory in his time.

James Webb Space Telescope

• JWST is a joint NASA–ESA–CSA space telescope that is planned to succeed the Hubble Space Telescope as NASA’s flagship astrophysics mission
• It is the most powerful space telescope ever built.
• It will enable a broad range of investigations across the fields of astronomy and cosmology, including observing some of the most distant events and objects in the universe,
• It would help understand events such as the formation of the first galaxies, and detailed atmospheric characterization of potentially habitable exoplanets.

Its significance

• Some have called JSWT the “telescope that ate astronomy.”
• It is said to look back in time to the Dark Ages of the universe as it will examine every phase of cosmic history: from the Big Bang to the formation of galaxies, stars, and planets to the evolution of our own Solar System.
• The JWST will be able to see right through and into massive clouds of dust that are opaque to earlier generation visible-light observatories like the Hubble Telescope. 

• The Webb is equipped with cameras and other instruments sensitive to infrared or “heat” radiation, and the Hubble is not.

SMACS 0723

• The galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 shows the image of “thousands of galaxies” as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago.
• NASA has shared the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant galaxy cluster taken from the James Webb Space telescope.
• Galaxy clusters are the largest objects in the universe that are held together by their own gravity.
• It provide us with information about the structure of the universe on the largest scales

Big Bang Theory

• Big bang theory, often known as the expanding universe hypothesis, is a current theory that attempts to answer numerous issues about the origin of the world.
• Edwin Hubble, in 1920, provided evidence that the universe is expanding.
• As time passes, galaxies move further and further apart. Similarly, the distance between the galaxies is also found to be increasing and thereby, the universe is considered to be expanding. Scientists believe that though the space between the galaxies is increasing, observations do not support the expansion of galaxies.