It's still rare, but the orders of magnitude higher density, and the fact that globular clusters get quite old, means that there's a lot of opportunities. Here's a recent paper about the topic, if you want to read more.

Good question! On the planet formation side: protoplanetary disks would be heavily irradiated by the other nearby stars, which tends to shorten the lifetime available to planet formation; they can also get disrupted by flyby-events. If a planetary system does form, those same flybys continue and can disrupt it over longer timescales. On the other hand, we don't - to the best of my knowledge - have very good constraints on planet occurrence rates in globular clusters, because they're far away and hard to observe, but I would say from a theoretical point of view these are quite well-understood mechanisms.

Significantly closer! The stellar density in the Solar neighborhood is around 0.14 pc^(-3), in globular cluster cores that goes up to ~ 1000 pc^(-3). That may also mean that the formation (and survival) of any planets is significantly suppressed around the stars in a globular cluster.

Good thing too that the one land animal mad enough to think they're tasty is also mad enough to domesticate them and plant them everywhere, so it's a win for the peppers anyway.

It's like a regular telescope, but wearing a toga!

Lovely story. But I think you meant Jabari rather than Sadiki in the second-to-last paragraph?

> there's too much to unpack here

Well, no, there really isn't. You say Webb produces data 'without intervention by a human', and 'a huge amount of findings [are] produced by an algorithm'. That's a really weird way of putting it, because the vast majority of Webb time is obtained by individual projects designed to look at specific things, with dedicated analysis plans. Of course there's a nonneglible amount of bycatch, so to speak - but that's not what I read in your comment.

That does not - at all - resemble the work my colleagues and I are doing with JWST data. MIRI MRS has a FoV of 6.6'' x 7.7''; that's really quite large but it's not gigantic by any means (the size of the detector is impressive, but that's because this is an IFU). Also, I haven't seen particularly unusual amounts of machine learning in any of the data processing papers so far. Could you clarify what you're talking about here?

JWST doesn't. In this case, it's arguable (they picked it up on calibration data, which are taken regularly) that it sort of did, but given Webb's limited lifetime and extreme pressure on observing time, it's essentially always being directed to look at something, calibrating, or changing its orientation. It's not an automated survey telescope!

I have issues with the author, yes, but I also genuinely have some issues with the way NAOC (seem to) approach this, however hard that apparently is to believe.

It's more 'being annoyed at the blatant overstatement and propagandistic tone' but sure, call it being triggered.

I know Chinese astronomers work with colleagues outside of China, but I mean specifically when it comes to instruments and telescopes like this. And sure, there are specific use cases where more similar instruments are better - but the pressure on 6m-class telescopes isn't that high. It's also not observing a different part of the sky, so then you're getting into the pure time series coverage thing, which again, nice, but not particularly groundbreaking either, and certainly not deserving of this level of hyperbole.

> When it comes to observing our skies, it’s hard to compete with China’s initiatives. If the nation continues its current efforts it could soon lead the way in space observation.

This is just... Nuts? This article mentions several telescopes that will in the future do exactly zero things the rest of the world isn't already doing. Roman will do the same as the space telescope they discuss, at a slightly higher resolution, and the only way in which this segmented telescope seems to resemble Webb is the segmentation; but we were already doing that anyway?

Chinese astronomers have every right to be proud of their work, but not in this way please. Also, I do feel like it's more sensible to collaborate with other countries on these projects than doing them yourself, as it seems like there's a lot of essentially duplicate facilities now, but that's of course policy at a level most astronomers can't affect either.

It's also on arxiv for free, you can find it here.