Campus to Cosmos
On the fall equinox, I pause to think about balance in the cosmos and how our understanding of it continues to shift. The James Webb Space Telescope’s confirmation of the Hubble Tension underscores how universities power discovery. Hubble itself was guided by the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins, where faculty and students shaped decades of cosmic exploration. Caltech and MIT advanced theory and instrumentation, while the University of Arizona built detectors and pioneered mirror design at its renowned Mirror Lab. Webb’s breakthrough shows how the campus-to-lab ecosystem—professors, students, and facilities working with federal labs and global partners—drives cosmology forward, revealing that even our deepest assumptions remain provisional.
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Elmer Yglesias, University of Arizona Mirror Lab, 2024. Personal photo.