did you and the moon and jupiter conspire

(L4 and L5, even farther away, are home to a couple of asteroids nudged there by nature, while 元, on the other side of the sun, is, based on our current understanding, empty. “It’s a really neat way to use the gravity of the solar system,” Michelle Thaller, an astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, told me. Space agencies over the years have anchored all kinds of missions at the first two Lagrange points, known as L1 and L2 for short. This is a remarkable phenomenon that human beings have not only figured out exists, but managed to use for their own purposes. Read: This isn’t the big telescope debut NASA imagined “But the combination of the Earth and sun’s gravitational effects at the Lagrange points allows the objects to orbit at the same rate as the Earth.” At a Lagrange point, gravity puts an object in lockstep with Earth’s journey around the sun. “Normally, objects closer to the sun than the Earth would orbit more quickly, while objects farther out than the Earth would orbit more slowly,” Neil Cornish, an astrophysicist at Montana State University, explained to me. The invisible perches are known as Lagrange points, named after one of the mathematicians who worked out their existence in the late 1700s. But NASA has decided that as far as scenic overlooks go, this one is worth the trip. Webb will orbit too far away for any astronauts to swing by if the observatory breaks. From here, the telescope will be able to see it all, from the planets in our solar system to the most distant galaxies in the universe. The James Webb Space Telescope is the next Hubble, NASA’s most important mission in a generation, charged with peering deeper into the universe than ever before, and it has found one of the best parking spots in the cosmos. For comparison, Hubble, NASA’s most famous space telescope, now more than 30 years old, orbits just 340 miles above Earth.

Those forces have gifted us five such special points near Earth, and later this month, NASA’s brand-new space telescope will head to the one found about a million miles away, four times farther than the moon. Put something there-an asteroid, a spacecraft, even a cloud of dust-and it will more or less stay there, suspended by the unseen forces of gravity. There are points in space where a quirk of physics borders on sorcery, where Earth and the sun have conspired to produce a special kind of equilibrium. The aurora borealis on Earth, the collision of solar particles and atmospheric molecules painting the night sky with a ghostly green.īut some of the most mesmerizing marvels in our cosmic neighborhood are, actually, completely invisible. The delicate rings of Saturn, the countless pieces of ice and rock arrayed like grooves on vinyl. Our solar system is brimming with stunning phenomena: the stormy atmosphere of Jupiter, its clouds coiling like cream poured into hot coffee.

Did you and the moon and jupiter conspire