I have been spending a lot of time lately writing up a formal paper on high redshift galaxies, so haven’t had much time to write here. The paper is a lot more involved than I told you so, but yeah, I did. Repeatedly. I do have a start on a post on self-interacting dark matter that I hope eventually to get back to. Today, I want to give a quick note about the MHONGOOSE survey. But first, a non-commercial interruption.

We will return to our usual programming shortly. But first, a few words on the eclipse experience last Monday. It. Was. Awesome . That’s a few words, so Mission Accomplished. That’s really all I had planned to say. However, I find I am still giddy from this momentous event, so will share my experience of the day, such as words can humbly convey.

Perhaps the most compelling astronomical phenomenon accessible to a naked-eye observer is a total eclipse of the sun. These rare events have always fascinated us, and often terrified us. It is abnormal and disturbing for the sun to be blotted from the sky! A solar eclipse will occur on Monday, 8 April 2024. A partial eclipse will be visible from nearly every part of North America.

In 1986, I was a grad student at Princeton, working in the atomic physics lab of Will Happer. It was at a department colloquium that I first heard a science talk that raised serious concerns about our use of fossil fuels potentially impacting the climate. This was not received well. People asked all sorts of questions, with much of the discussion revolving around feedback effects.

Taking a break from galaxies and cosmology, I’d like to post a little praise of NASA for safely returning a piece of an asteroid to Earth. One of the amazing things to me about astronomy & astrophysics is that we have learned how to decipher the composition of distant stars and gas clouds by observing their spectra. I worked on this early in my career and retain an interest in the cosmic abundance of the elements.

Why does MOND get any predictions right? That’s the question of the year, and perhaps of the century. I’ve been asking it since before this century began, and I have yet to hear a satisfactory answer.

I would like to write something positive to close out the year. Apparently, it is not in my nature, as I am finding it difficult to do so. I try not to say anything if I can’t say anything nice, and as a consequence I have said little here for weeks at a time. Still, there are good things that happened this year. JWST launched a year ago. The predictions I made for it at that time have since been realized.

It has been two months since my last post. Sorry for the extended silence, but I do have a real job. It is not coincidental that my last post precedes the start of the semester. It has been the best of semesters, but mostly the worst of semesters. On the positive side, I’m teaching our upper level cosmology course. The students are great, really interested and interactive.

Dark matter remains undetected in the laboratory. This has been true for forever, so I don’t know what drives the timing of the recent spate of articles encouraging us to keep the faith, that dark matter is still a better idea than anything else. This depends on how we define “better.” There is a long-standing debate in the philosophy of science about the relative merits of accommodation and prediction.

I noted last time that in the rush to analyze the first of the JWST data, that “some of these candidate high redshift galaxies will fall by the wayside.” As Maurice Aabe notes in the comments there, this has already happened. I was concerned because of previous work with Jay Franck in which we found that photometric redshifts were simply not adequately precise to identify the clusters and protoclusters we were looking for.