Abstract: This project was a fairly simple one where we just had to find two articles summarize them and write our thoughts about it. It was interesting since we had to find two science related articles from the New York Times, articles that had been published very recently. 

The first article I found was “Webb Telescope Spots a Distant Spiral Galaxy Like Our Own” by Dennis Overbye was posted on 02/13/2023. Overbye describes the mission of the James Webbspace Telescope which is to explore and find when the universe first began. The article shows a picture showing many galaxies in it while also showing a very similar looking milky way galaxy called LEDA 2046648. This galaxy is a billion light years away and it’s so far away that the light being emitted was when life was still in its really early stages back on Earth. The article goes onto describe how the Webb telescope works. The telescope is able to detect infrared rays. The universe expands so fast that the light reaching earth is red shifted which only the Webb’s telescope can see. The image of the LEDA galaxy was obtained on May 22, 2022 but was only released on January 31st of this year.

I find this article very interesting due to how similar this new found galaxy is to ours. Also how we are looking at this galaxy how it was a billion years ago. It makes you think if they have life over there, they would look at our galaxy the same way. Moreover, I find the idea of the Webb telescope trying to find basically the origin of our universe very intriguing. They describe how the telescope works, explaining “The Webb’s secret sauce is its ability to detect infrared rays, or electromagnetic radiation of longer wavelengths than visible light that is thus invisible to human eyes” (Overbye).

The second article I found is “The biggest Penguin That ever existed was a ‘Monster Bird ”. The article was written by Jack Tamisiea and published Feb 8, 2023. The article begins with where the remains of this Monster Bird was found. New Zealand was the home of many flightless birds including penguins. This species of penguin is believed to have lived as much as 60 million years ago and weighed almost 350 pounds. The bird’s bones were discovered in 2017. Two types of penguins were discovered with the biggest one being named Kumimanu and the smaller one called Perudyptes. The humerus of the larger penguin was shown to be almost twice the size of an emperor penguin. These penguins were able to survive the impact of the asteroid but their smaller cousins did end up surviving a lot longer. It is speculated that these monster birds would crush their eggs a lot of the time due to their immense weight.

I found this article very intriguing because I never would have thought that penguins could have gotten to that size. It is very interesting because many other animals were a lot larger than what they are now days. I do wonder why many of these bigger version of birds and animals are so much smaller now. I found very amusing how these were thought to not have problems with their other smaller counter-selfs due them going for the bigger pray while the mid to smaller penguins would go for much smaller food. The article does not mention what kind of prey these monster birds go for, which I would have liked to see being written about.