Wow, you can really see the gravitational lensing on that one.
I was wondering which of the 5 photos [1] they'd tease today (remaining 4 are coming tomorrow). My guess was also gonna be the deep field one, especially since it maps nicely to the well known Hubble photo. But now it begs the question, how does this one compare to the Hubble one in terms of scale/angle.
Some of those arcs seem concentric, so I would assume a mass in that direction. More likely there are multiple masses distorting multiple objects into multiple arcs, but I am not an astronomer and my guess is as good as anyone else's (who's not an astronomer)
According to https://www.newscientist.com/article/2328132-james-webb-spac..., "This first image is a region of space called SMACS 0723, which contains what astronomers call a gravitational lens. In areas like this, a massive object relatively close to Earth behaves like a magnifying glass, distorting space and stretching the light of anything behind it." and "The gravitational lens in SMACS 0723 is particularly strong because the nearby object distorting space-time is not one galaxy, but a large cluster of galaxies."
From the analysis I've seen, I understand the white-appearing objects at the center of the image are the galaxies that compose that galaxy cluster. The very red and deformed galaxies around them are much further away but made visible due to the gravitational lensing.
According to the Webb Space Telescope post [1]: "This slice of the vast universe is approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground."
According to the Hubble Site post [2]: "...the Hubble Deep Field image covers a speck of the sky only about the width of a dime 75 feet away"
Edit: So that same page for the Webb image states 2.4 arcmin across, compared to ~3.4 arcmin for the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image [3]
Yea, feels like the swirly bokeh of a photo taken using a lens with mechanical vignetting or sagittal astigmatism (colloquially Petzval, but field curvature is both sagittal and tangential).
Something to drive home how impressive this is - "If you held a grain of sand up to the sky at arm’s length, that tiny speck is the size of Webb’s view in this image."
And in that view there are thousands of galaxyes each with billions of stars orbiting around. I so badly wish i had the money and time to spend it all on exploring the universe.
All the money and time in the world won’t even get you close to our closest neighboring star, which is literally a billion times closer to us than what we see in this picture
I’d settle for a colony on europa or a planet wide city on mars - no need to terraform it, just seal the surface and build a vast controlled environment.
I know similar calculations were done for Hubble's deep field, but we need to do it again here: count the number of galaxies in this photo, then multiply it by the area of the sky divided by the area of this image (I think it's 2.4 arc minute across?)
What a weirdly botched release.
90 min delay with nothing more than a title screen and a terrible repeating music track. (When it was at least an opportunity to display material related to the project for those stopping in due to media coverage).
A labyrinth of a website with interlinking and crosslinking throughout.
Web links that come up blank.
And an unprepared accompanying statement for the image given off the cuff by the director.
Weird press conference -- 'who is this for?'
All around, just strange and poorly executed from a communications/media standpoint. Completely inexcusable for an organization like this.
Meh...yeah it was a bit disorganized. I think it's possible to see that as less of a big deal. Honestly, I kind of appreciated the informality of it. Realistically, scientific announcements don't have as much mind share as earthbound current affairs. I think that's unfortunate, but it's also the reality of things. The effort put into the event probably lined up with those priorities.
Seems to me like people are overly sensitive about missteps like this nowadays; too quick to lob criticism.
The organization was part of it. The bigger concern was probably the content that was not fit for the medium -- that's a failure in advance. Having a camera feed of a screen with smaller screens within it with unreadable text captions for seemingly important people ...is not appropriate. This type of content is so perfect for modern media distribution (instagram, youtube, twitter, tiktok) but those channels aren't properly used (or they're ignored altogether). It just seems like such a missed opportunity for an incredible public science communications event.
(TBH, it's much more likely that this was botched by the WhiteHouse rather than NASA -- so there's hope that tomorrow's event will be a bit more useful on the science/public/comms front).
Reminds me of Arianespace's launch streams compared to pretty much everyone else's. All of new space tries to make their streams interesting and modern without shifting the focus from the thing that matters (the rocket), while Arianespace shows a bunch of people talking with a tiny view of the rocket people actually care about seeing. Lately even ULA has pretty cool footage to show afterwards.
Feels like this is just the usual case of the 'old guard' being completely out of touch.
Three struts, but because of light diffraction, six spikes.
There are much smaller diffraction effects which are in part due to the mirrors, but these are far smaller and not immediately evident. Both apply largely to foreground point sources, which is to say, relatively nearby stars. Distant objects with an appreciable size don't produce diffraction spikes.
Of course, the JWST without its struts and its mirrors wouldn't be much of a telescope! So the diffraction spikes are a part of doing business and also have the helpful side effect of allowing us to quickly know which objects are stars vs galaxies, since only the former have the really prominent spikes.
Who is flagging this extremely valid criticism of this photo release circus? I totally agree with this sentiment and it is something that science teams will have to reflect on for future communications. This was absolutely terrible.
interestica 5 minutes ago [flagged] [dead] | prev [–]
What a weirdly botched release. 90 min delay with nothing more than a title screen and a terrible repeating music track. (When it was at least an opportunity to display material related to the project for those stopping in due to media coverage). A labyrinth of a website with interlinking and crosslinking throughout. Web links that come up blank. And an unprepared accompanying statement for the image given off the cuff by the director. Weird press conference -- 'who is this for?'
All around, just strange and poorly executed from a communications/media standpoint. Completely inexcusable for an organization like this.
Flagging because overly-harsh armchair criticism towards a piece of the world's most advanced precision engineering operating in deep space that isn't really even fully operational yet. President of the world's most powerful country at least coming out to talk about it. Only really one image to release because said device is brand spanking new. What exactly do you want? Kanye West and a load of confetti?
The telescope is great. The presentation was a joke. I waited an hour, went to the kitchen for a couple minutes, came back to find it had just ended and couldn't be replayed. Found a direct link to the science page myself.
Ever wonder why lots of people don't give a hoot about science funding? This is why, you promise them something important and exceptional and then deliver a low quality product. Again, I refer to the streaming event, not the telescope/science team.
I knew to look for that because I'm a nerd, as are most people here. I'm talking about the impression this makes on those who are not predisposed to be interested. Those people vote too, and when NASA delivers the sort of experience stereotypically associated with the DMV it influences their outlook.
In fairness, some of the criticism isn't armchair: some of us work in science, may know what good science communication can look like, and can then be fairly critical of what is a wonderful opportunity for effective communication with a large audience being mishandled. These opportunities do not come every day, so it's important to make the most of them.
I imagine the NASA conference tomorrow may give more clarity, e.g. perhaps today's announcement was a last-minute press op that wasn't sufficiently planned? Maybe the full NASA briefing will be better.
With that said, I think it's fair to keep this discussion separate so as not to overshadow the very real and tremendous accomplishment we're witnessing today. Obviously the manner of the announcement is insignificant compared to the result itself, and I hope everyone involved is very rightly proud.
The same people who flagged me for predicting the public speaking would be as terrible as it turned out to be and that they needed to find better people to handle this. This was just embarrassing, especially considering what's been done in the past.
A few days ago I saw a tweet (because Twitter shows me "Popular" crap all the time) from some "science influencer" that said something like "The new pictures from the Webb telescope are bringing scientists to tears!".
I get that's how they earn their bread but from my point of view it comes off as awkward and dishonest, it does the complete opposite of getting me excited about the release.
I just found how bad it was to be utterly strange and unexpected:
No updates via their channels on the delay.
Their linked live stream had no mention of delay and just displayed general unrelated content (about the ISS). In situ comments were also turned off so there was no way to corroborate with others that there was a delay or if one was even in the right space for the release.
Even when eventually ready to go live, they made no update -- those that got to see from the beginning were those that happened to be keeping the feed open for the 90mins.
In the press conference, it was a screen of a screen displayed within a screen. When the 3 highlighted members were featured, their names were thus too small to be seen on the feed.
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
This was not the first awkward science press event and it won’t be the last. It’s annoying but that is not noteworthy; life is full of annoyances. A new deep image from a new space telescope is what is really noteworthy.
Also from a practical perspective, complaining here won’t reach the people you actually want to influence. NASA staff are publicly available; if you want to complain, look up their email addresses and write to them directly. You might even get a reply!
All the very red galaxies in the JWST image are mostly or completely invisible in the Hubble image. That’s because they’re so redshifted that they’re out of the spectrum Hubble can see. Those are the galaxies that are really far away.
Comparing both images, there is a perfectly round red dot that's just a few pixels wide, a little up from the most prominent star, which doesn't correspond to another object in Hubble's image. Is that an image artifact or some laser guide?
Could be an internal reflection. The optical path for many JWST instruments is, uh, compact: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Videos/2021/09/Webb_MIRI_... (Every kilo on telescope structure you save by folding the optical path is a kilo you can add in propellant, extending the working life of the spacecraft)
Instrument internals are painted black and heavily baffled, but nothing in optics is perfect. Dithering the direction the telescope is pointed in and image stacking should cancel out most optical artifacts, but internal reflections will be worse for bright objects like stars, which JWST probably isn't usually going to be observing with the imaging instruments.
It is a bit suspicious looking, but there's a lot of very red objects that the Hubble image doesn't catch. Presuming that the red colors in the images are the deeper infrared wavelengths (and thus the most heavily-redshifted objects) I would guess that Hubble just didn't have the detectors to see those.
Here's a variant of that GIF that separates out the blue, blue+green, and blue+green+red channels, to (hopefully) highlight which differences are due to the longer wavelengths (and which look more like exposure time difference). Webb's color mapping roughly aligns with the RGB channels, so I think this is meaningful [0].
Yes, that's generally true. Galaxies that are redshifted are moving very fast relative to us. But the only reason for them to be moving so fast is due to the expansion of the universe, and these galaxies being sufficiently far away.
The large white elliptical galaxies in the center of the image are in the "foreground", while the orange-ish galaxies are much farther away in the background. This is why the light from the more distant galaxies is curved and distorted by the foreground objects, creating the lensing effect that we see.
Hubbles law says that astronomical objects that are further away also move away from us more quickly with the constant of proportionality being the Hubble constant
I couldn't find an exact exposure time for the Hubble image, the press release by the ESA has this quote though:
"This deep field, taken by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), is a composite made from images at different wavelengths, totaling 12.5 hours – achieving depths at infrared wavelengths beyond the Hubble Space Telescope’s deepest fields, which took weeks." [1] There is also another comment further down this thread stating Hubble was 140 hours. [2]
Those exposure times (weeks / 140 hours) are for these images [0,1], Hubble's deep fields. Hubble's photo of this galaxy cluster, the one our root comment shows superimposed over JWST's, took 5 Hubble orbits [2]. I think that's around 2-3 hours of exposure time.
(If you want to verify [2] is talking about the same photo, you can retrieve it from the "SMACS J0723.3-7327" row, from the "Color Images" column/field).
Yes, but Earth obstructs the field of view for about half that time. The way HST refers to an "orbit" for scheduling, only part of the elapsed time is usable observational time, for a single target.
- "HST GO observing time is counted in terms of orbits. Each 96-minute orbit contains a certain amount of useful time when the target can be observed, called the orbital visibility period..."
> This deep field, taken by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), is a composite made from images at different wavelengths, totaling 12.5 hours – achieving depths at infrared wavelengths beyond the Hubble Space Telescope’s deepest fields, which took weeks.
12.5 hours total exposure for the JWST image, "weeks" for the HST image
Is the actual comparison HST image being used here from the hubble deep field?
EDIT: Doesn't look like it is -- it is from a more recent 2019-published study of SMACS J0723.3-732 as part of the Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey (RELICS).
Although that paper does mention that this image is the deepest image of the Universe to date, and that the Fine Guidance Sensor image may be the second deepest, both exceeding the Hubble Deep Field image.
I always wonder if we had a sensitive enough instrument, would it get more difficult to pick out individual galaxies? Or, are there enough galaxies that an image taken by a very sensitive telescope would have no black areas?
Incredible. If each of those galaxies has on average a few hundred billion stars (our is estimated to have between 100b-400b), and each of those little dots is an entire galaxy, well, that's a lot of stars in this image.
I think you're referring to the age of the universe here? But due to inflation, although the universe is 13 billion years old, the observable universe is quite a bit bigger than that (i.e. we can see stars much further than 13 billion light years away).
Or maybe not. If you consider how improbable is the origin of life on the earth then maybe it's not even enough planets in the observable universe to start a life. But the universe is much greater than its observable part.
What is the probability of life originating on earth?
We know it is anywhere from 0 (originated elsewhere and found its way here) to 1 (originated here and is guaranteed to originate given the conditions). I don't think we have enough data points to determine improbability yet.
What is the probability of life originating in the universe? We know it is definitely greater than 0..
Humanity has found aminoacids in asteroids. Given enough time and energy, it seems likely to me that structures would form and then evolve in complexity.
Agreed. I realized recently that planets not only need a goldilocks configuration but likely also need to have a liquid metal core to create a protective magnetic field.
It would still occur quite a bit, and some planets with a protective field likely still produce simple life forms.
Since we're looking at objects billions of light years away, we're looking billions of years into the past. In the context of extragalactic life, it's a bit sad to me that even if we somehow spotted it at those insane distances, in the early versions of those galaxies we see, odds are that it'll be gone by now, and we'll likely be gone by the time any lucky photons born in our solar system can reach those places, too. Even so, it's cool to think that the odds of life being out there somewhere in a universe so vast are really quite good, inaccessible as it may be.
The .gif comparison was a bit... upsetting since the color palettes are so limited and the resolution is so low, so it really didn't put JWST _or_ Hubble in a good light.
It looks like restoration of an old painting where the aged, yellowed varnish is stripped away to reveal the (much brighter and more detailed) original painting below.
No. Webb looks deeper into the infrared and can see galaxies that Hubble can't see. There're some red galaxies in Webb (upper-right especially) that aren't in Hubble's at all.
Highly recommend the full-res image - brings out a great deal of character from a lot of the galaxies that is just not visible in the zoomed-out image.
Mainly because most of the pictures I usually see of the galaxies in space, they appear as practically identical dots. Never before I've seen this level of detail and the variety of shapes. Each of these galaxies have billions of stars and planets and they are billions of such galaxies. I know we have read these numbers before but just seeing them "up-close" like this in such a small section just makes it that much more real.
Just imagine how much more vivid they would appear once the technology progresses ever further.
> Mainly because most of the pictures I usually see of the galaxies in space, they appear as practically identical dots. Never before I've seen this level of detail and the variety of shapes.
Do you mean these specific galaxies? If not, you can see many galaxies in amazing detail with very modest equipment. If you know what you're looking for you can faintly see Andromeda with the naked eye.
I think I did see one of them and it was pretty amazing but James Webb images are on a new level. Also, I did know Hubble but didn't know the name Hubble Deep Field - thanks for mentioning that because I searched for it and found this:
Some of those shapes are just incredible, like the 4th that looks like a glimpse of what will happen shortly after the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy will collide in a few billion years.
How about 1.4 Gigapixel image of the galaxy? The new photos by @NASAWebb are stunning. Let's Enhance's AI made them super high res for you to enjoy the clearest view of the Universe.
I'm impressed that one of the first Webb images was a deep-field view.
Hubble's own Deep Field image required about 140 hours of imaging (divided amongst 4 bandwidths and ~150 separate imaging events). Webb's own view took a little over 12 hours. I was expecting nearer and brighter objects to be first targets. Impressive as heck.
Though of course, Hubble paved the way and showed that deep-field imaging is useful and provides insights.
I am not an astrophysicist or photographer for that matter... But wouldn't it be like a overexposed photo -- all red-and-white, because it will catch so much light from the distant galaxies and such?
no, that would be a single exposure (aka single integration). There’s so many reasons not to do that over many days. You take multiple exposures and stack them and mask bright things around saturation during coaddition
When people talk about how much time it takes for an astronomical image to be captured, they mean the total time involved over many, many, many individual shots. All of those images are then "stacked" with fancy algorithms to generate the final image.
This is how these images of very dim, distant galaxies are created without foreground stars blowing out the whole image.
This image stacking technology has crept in to smartphone cameras in the last handful of years, most prominently as "night mode".
From researching a couple of earlier comments here: a chief reason the Hubble DSF was composed of multiple images was to eliminate individual cosmic ray events which otherwise fog / degrade such images.
If you're interested in distant constant objects, then near-transient signals can be safely ignored and removed.
Yes, one has to be careful about guessing what they probably did, because the processing was actually pretty complex, and astrophysics image processing is in general quite advanced. Saturation of the digital numbers coming from the detector is one consideration, but only one among many -- there is a lot going on.
The wikipedia article has a lot of details, including masking the CR's, removing some scattered light from Earth, the use of multiple color bands, and super-resolution using slightly different pointing from frame to frame. All this processing is done at the single-image level, and motivates dividing up the exposure time into chunks.
The ~340 exposures were taken over about 10 days and spread over 4 color bands. The typical integration time for one exposure appears to have been about 30 minutes.
There is also a tradeoff where every read from a CCD introduces a fixed amount of noise (called read noise), so there is a cost to making extremely short exposures. As a rule of thumb most individual exposures on a large telescope are ~20 minutes or so for an image where the plan is to stack many exposures. But sometimes different fields have unique constraints, and obviously JWST is a different beast than ground based telescopes.
To an extent, yes, which is why DSF images tend to be aimed at "empty" sections of sky.
There are a few factors involved AFAIU:
- You don't want to be shooting through the Milky Way's own primary mass as nearby dust and gas will obstruct more distant objects.
- "Nearby" objects --- stars within the Milky Way, reasonably nearby galaxies --- might also tend to blow out the image. Though for the most part these end up being point sources. It's artefacts such as spikes which give the most obstruction.
In the case of the JWST, the fact that it's looking into the infrared means that it can see object which are literally invisible to Hubble regardless of how long the exposure.
The question of why space is black (or alternatively: why it's not uniformly light) is known as Olber's Paradox or "the dark-sky paradox", and dates back to the time of Keppler. Effectively: the universe has a finite age, and there is not an infinite number of stars (or other light sources) as one goes back in time.
There is a uniform illumination of the Universe that can be detected, as microwave radiation, known as the cosmic backgroud radiation. That occurs well below JWST's sensor range (0.6–28.3 μm), however, with a peak wavelength of about 1 mm.
Regarding Olber's paradox, would an infinite number of stars really imply the sky would be uniformly bright? Why couldn't (say) the following alternative explanations work?
(a) The universe is infinite, but has been (and will always be) stretching faster than would allow light from galaxies too far away to ever reach us.
(b) The universe is infinite and not even stretching, but there is enough (dark?) matter in it to eventually block any ray of light coming from infinitely far away.
I think (a) could work, but in (b), if matter were absorbing light for an infinite span of time, it would eventually heat up and glow itself. “Dark” matter does not directly interact with electromagnetism aka light, so wouldn’t block it.
The basic (in photography) is that you can counter balance exposure time with the opening of the lens; the less light gets in, the longer it gets to take a well exposed picture (basically).
But since it’s all digital you can also counterbalance higher and lower exposure zones to grab the details that would have been over or under exposed (hdr)… unsure of how these basic photography rules would work out in this case… could anyone elaborate ?
Dabbler in photography, general familiarity with astronomy:
The goals are to maximise light capture (the objects being imaged are dim and distant), whilst miniising any degredation from other factors. JWST doesn't ahve to deal with skyglow, daylight, or satellite interference. It may still be seeing other solar system bodies (depending on where it's aiming), but mostly would be subject to cosmic-ray interference, probably impacting on the light sensor itself.
Since those are essnetially instantaneous and randomly distributed with time, by "stacking" images and filtering out transient events (taking an average or median brightness AFAIU).
I'm not sure to what extend HDR is used in astronomical imaging.
There is a lot of post-processing and palette selection to apply colours to what are just intensity maps at a given frequency.
Yes and no. It's not a kodak moment. "Camera" there basically squints hard and blinks often and then fancy algorithms reconstruct a full image based on that.
I was honestly slightly underwhelmed by the improvement in detail until I saw your comment about the exposure times. Now my mind is utterly blown, thank you.
I need to double-check the colour-to-wavelength mapping, but I suspect many of the redder objects in the image would be entirely invisible to the Hubble simply by being beyond its sensor range in the IR spectrum.
Right, the longest wavelength filter here is 4.4 µm [0]. In Hubble's version, the reddest filter they use is 1.6 µm on WFC3/IR [1] (which I believe is Hubble's reddest overall and limited by its optics). Four of the six filters used are outside Hubble's range.
[0] "In this case, the assigned colors are: Red: F444W Orange: F356W Green: F200W + F277W Blue: F090W + F150W"
It's impossible for me not to wonder how many species of life are in this photo, intelligent or otherwise, and things we can't even begin to imagine. The hostile environments, the ones blossoming with beautiful calm, and the frightening distance between everything in the photo where basically nothing exists, I'm having trouble even processing what I'm looking at here, it's just so... vast.
I'm excited to see what the other photos look like but even more, for what the next 10+ years of space photography might reveal.
If I could wish for one thing, it'd be some vast improvement in black hole photography. While I appreciate the recent achievements in even being able to capture a black hole on film, I imagine a photo as life-like as the simulated black hole in Interstellar would make it hard to not get emotional seeing such an incomprehensibly powerful object in great detail.
Looking at this photo, I mean it is beautiful, but we can’t wrap our head around the maddening violence of space. It’s so hostile to life, and earth has us biased towards a peaceful outlook, but space is maddeningly violent and inhospitable. Imagine approaching a black hole and being spaghettified a great distance across where you have to endure many years of physical & mental torture before being destroyed at the event horizon?!
This actually just gave me a super dark thought, I do wonder if any "life" has experienced being pulled into a black hole over the last few billion years.
Yeah I mean time breaks down and you experience everything in slow motion and are stuck circling a black hole for what seems like an eternity. It’s unlikely to happen to anyone here on Earth, but you are right, there’s the likelihood of other life getting stuck in these things.
Depends on your solution to the Drake equation. But unless you think life is universally unique to earth, I’d say it’s quite likely. The universe is big, if there’s any more life, there’s a lot of it, and models predict there are lots of black holes out there in every galaxy.
> Imagine approaching a black hole and being spaghettified a light year across where you have to endure a thousand years of physical torture before being destroyed at the event horizon?!
This would only happen for very small blackholes, and even then from your point of view time would act normally.
Is there any evidence for time dilation though? My 1000 years number is a rough guess, and it could be shorter or even longer than that. I was thinking since physics breaks down that you would have to endure being spaghettified whilst still being able to feel and have nerves intact and thinking capacity.
> My 1000 years number is a rough guess, and it could be shorter or even longer than that. I was thinking since physics breaks down that you would have to endure being spaghettified whilst still being able to feel and have nerves intact and thinking capacity.
For an outside observer it might seem like a long time, but not for you.
Even if your brain is perceiving time normally, even if you’re not experiencing enough acceleration to be crushed yet, I really don’t want to think about the effects of a severe time-dilation gradient on the rest of the body.
Assuming that a reasonable fraction of the planets have life, and then some non-vanishingly small number have intelligent life, this photo contains millions or even billions of planets with intelligence.
The Star Trek vision of the future is a handful of contacted races, all very distinct.
This.. this is nearly a continuum of possibility. Political systems? This image has them all, and every intermediate, outlier, and axis explored. Warfaring? There are more than likely a million battles being fought in this image, right "now". A trillion-trillion soldiers and weapons systems of every kind, and every kind in between. Flying tanks. Hover artillery. Underwater helicopters. Nanobots. Microbots. In-between bots. Every kind of bot.
I am curious. What happens if they aim this telescope at some of the closer exo planets? Would we get images with atmospheres and such? Excuse the excitement, but that would be so cool!
I don't think so, I think planets are just too small and far away to be much more than points of light (or shadows crossing in front of stars).
In a lot of cases, we infer the presence of planets by making very precise measurements of relative velocities of stars (using red/blue shift of light) and making note of periodic wobbles that indicate that its position is being affected by planets.
The planets will still just be star-like bright dots, but we will get some useful new spectral data, and be able to image much smaller and more distant ones. https://webb.nasa.gov/content/science/origins.html
> Webb will also carry coronagraphs to enable direct imaging of exoplanets near bright stars. The image of an exoplanet would just be a spot, not a grand panorama, but by studying that spot, we can learn a great deal about it. That includes its color, differences between winter and summer, vegetation, rotation, weather...How is this done? The answer again is spectroscopy.
To add to what the others said, I think it was mentioned previously that one of the things being released tomorrow is spectra of an exoplanet's atmosphere.
The size difference between our galaxy and our planet is ~14 orders of magnitude. For a planet to have the same dimensions as in the picture, it must be proportionally closer. That means if these galaxies from the image are 1e10..1e11 light years away (whether you guess to ignore the expansion or not), a planet must be 1e-3..1e-4 light years away, which barely covers the distance to Pluto.
Of course the above doesn’t account for lensing and who knows what else, but you get the idea. (If my math is correct)
You need to mask out the bright star with a coronagraph and then the planet needs to be big/bright enough. Even then you will just see a dot as this ESO telescope image shows. However using spectroscopy they can deduce the composition of the planet atmosphere.
It seems to be a common misconception that JWST will give us the best angular resolution of any existing telescope. However that is not the case. JWST was designed for lower wavelengths, and due to physics reasons you get a lower angular resolution for a given reflector diameter, as compared to higher wavelengths.
So even though the JWST is a larger scope, Hubble's visible wavelength photos are higher resolution than JWST's longer wavelength photos.
imagine a distant galaxy, say ~1billion light years away (not 13 like in this new image).
imagine a civilization in this galaxy.
any information takes ~1billion years to travel between us and them.
but say ten years pass from our frame of reference here on Earth.
in those ten years on Earth, did the civilization ~1billion years away also experience roughly ~10years from their point of view?
I guess what I'm trying to ask is, in the time it took me to write this comment, could there be some part of the universe experiencing a much faster rate of time, relative to us? Did a civilization rise and fall somewhere? Does this question even make sense, or is it one of those things where relativity is so unintuitive that asking a question like this is nonsensical?
I once asked this question to a scientist and I believe the passage of time seems pretty uniform (in similar gravitational circumstances) The exception is the beginning of the universe where time might have been more fluid for the lack of a better word.
Also I remember a short story where scientists created a mini universe then find that they can take over conscious beings in this reality, and influence them. So a few minutes to the scientists is thousands of years in this simulation, and they use it to get new technology and such.
Uncountable universes(multiverse) are born when Supreme consciousness Vishnu breathes out. Inside each universe God Bharma is born with the responsibly of managing the affair. Brahma lives for his 100 years which is roughly 311 billion years. During this time many mini cycles of creation and dissolution takes place. When Bharma finally dies after completing his 100 years,that particular universe dies with him. After another 311 billion years another Brahma is born again and universe restarts. When supreme god Vishnu finally breathes in, multiverse stop existing and creation end till the time supreme god breathes out again.
That's beautiful. I always wondered if there's some lost knowledge from ye olde ancient past where people knew more (about what we consider scinetific facts now) than we thought they did when they came up with these stories.
Hindus were thinking about time ranging from nano seconds to billions of years[0]. As far lost knowledge is concerned Indian civilization have faced numerous attacks especially on its knowledge system and wealth. During one such attack Nalanda university was destroyed, more than 10000 teachers were killed, and library with millions of books was set on fire which raged for 3 months. Invaders themselves recorded these event gleefully. As per them India was a land of idol worshipers.Here is summary article which contains links to primary sources[1]. It's through struggle and luck Indian civilization have survived although with lots of gaps.
I am sure there were others great civilizations. But they are not here any more to tell the tale.
I think the Greeks through Anaximander had the concept of "apeiron", or the infinite. Some of them believed the universe to be infinitely old, therefore they must have had the concept of one to infinity, including billions.
Yep ancient civilizations have thought about these concepts for a long time. Some got destroyed by floods, some by famine, but horrific destruction have happened when Abrahmic religions came on the scene with "holier than thou" philosophy which made destruction of others a religious duty.
Hindus were obsessed with zero and infinity and to them it was the same as god itself. Shanti mantra(used to wish well to all living being) from īśopaniṣad says.
> That is Whole and this is Whole, the perfect has come out of the perfect; having taken the perfect from the perfect, only the perfect remains. Let there be Peace, Peace, Peace.
Verse above describes God superficially but it also describes zero and infinity[0]. This small text with only 18 verses and yet it is so profound. Similarly Buddhist philosophy which also came out from India is based on Shunya(zero).
>>but horrific destruction have happened when Abrahmic religions came on the scene with "holier than thou" philosophy which made destruction of others a religious duty.
Both true and false. Most of the killing and destruction was done by the pagans to themselves. The pagan wars were no joke. Here in the Indian subcontinent itself there was a war called 'Kalinga War', the death and destruction was just so much and complete. Nothing remained standing.
After Kalinga war Ashoka renounced voilence as per the teaching of Buddhism. Do you have a parallel example from Abrahmic kings?
Having said that every civilization have had destructive infights. People fought for money, power,fame etc.
But that doesn't mean they destroyed each other's knowledge system, temples, and monuments. That's is only true for Abrahmic philosophy which stresses on destroying the culture and knowledge systems of the conquered.
>>After Kalinga war ... Do you have a parallel example from Abrahmic kings?
No, I don't have any example of any king in Europe, Middle East or North Africa who fought a war as destructive as Kalinga war. And that's just one war.
>>Having said that every civilization have had destructive infights. People fought for money, power,fame etc.
Causes for the fall of any civilisation are always internal, eventually you just get take over by somebody better.
>>That's is only true for Abrahmic philosophy which stresses on destroying the culture and knowledge systems of the conquered.
> No, I don't have any example of any king in Europe...
Kalinga deaths are recorded to be 150000. I will suggest reading about the crusades and others religious wars to find how many were killed. Please also read about how Bible was used to justify the slavery and subjugation of pagans.
Indian conquered upto Cambodia, Persians conquered a big part of known world yet didn't engage in erasing the native population or the culture of conquered. But in contrast almost entire population of native Americans were annihilated. They practically do not exist.
> Would love read more upon 'Abrahmic Philosophy'.
First 2 commandments of bible summarises the doctrine/philosophy.
> or is it one of those things where relativity is so unintuitive that asking a question like this is nonsensical?
The latter. One of the most unintuive aspects of relativity is the relativity of simultaneity. Basically, the order in which events happen in different places in the universe is relative. Imagine event A happening in galaxy A, event B happening in galaxy B, and event C happening in galaxy C.
From the POV of one observer, events might happen in order ABC, while for other they may happen in order BCA.
This doesn't mean that the observers simply see the events in different order because of their distance to them--it means that even when taking distance into account, one event happened before the other.
So yes, a civilization rose while you wrote that comment. It also fell... from the POV of someone else.
Does time move faster the deeper you are in a gravity well?
If a civilization was trying to compete with another in another galaxy, could they coalesce as much matter as they could into a single star, increasing gravity, and relativistically experience more time in their star system than the other civilization?
Yes, it does (from the point of view of observers outside the gravity well), and yes they could. They could also accelerate themselves to relativistic speeds to accomplish the same feat.
I think they’d just need to travel slower through space to experience more time relative to the other civilization. Then that civilization could take more that time to develop a civilization-ending laser or whatever.
Then for gravity, the less gravity that civilization experiences the slower time moves for them relative to their competitor.
So I think the goal would be to send star matter to the other civilization so their time slows down relatively speaking.
If interstaller thought us anything, the closer you are to a black hole the slower time gets. When they got close to the black hole they only spent a few hours there but lost years compared to our frame of reference.
Time will pass for them very very closely to the same rate it does for us.
But here's something fun: the space between us and them is stretching, so in a billion years when the light arrives at our position, the time between photons will be longer than when they left (so things will appear slower) and the photons will be at a longer wavelength making it more red.
There are situations where time passes differently like with high speeds and in gravity wells, but except for unusual circumstances, time will pass mostly at the same rate for life on any two planets across the universe. Because on relativistic scales they’ll be in very nearly exactly the same inertial frame.
Like maybe a few nanoseconds over ten minutes difference. One could probably come up with a standard deviation statistic, but whatever it would be would be way below a perceptual difference. (We can measure the difference in the flow of time with a clock on a table compared to another on the floor, but of course that’s way less than could be felt)
Depends on their velocity relative to Earth. The unintuitive bit of relativity is that you observe the other as experiencing time more slowly - this is the origin of the twin paradox (i.e., shouldn't each twin observe the other as having aged less?) whose resolution comes from the fact that the second twin is in a non-inertial reference frame once he changes directions to return to Earth.
Reality is much crazier than that. Some of the distant galaxies are causally disconnected from us: they're receding faster than the speed of light (by one out of the several definitions), and will (probably) continue to do so, so no information can travel between us. No causal interaction is possible. It's as if they were practically no longer a part of this universe -- they can't affect anything here, and nothing here can affect them.
(I'm not certain on this point, but I think some of the high-redshift galaxies we can see in deep field images are now causally disconnected. We're receiving some of their old light, but we can't send anything back anymore -- they've faded out into infinite redshift).
edit: Here's an article about this idea by Ethan Siegel, and its HN discussion thread (thanks 'petilon for helping me remember the author):
“ In an expanding universe, the speed of expansion reaches — and even exceeds — the speed of light, preventing signals from traveling to some regions. A cosmic event horizon is a real event horizon because it affects all kinds of signals, including gravitational waves, which travel at the speed of light.”
Or light travels at the speed of gravity but for a different order of discovery and convention.
Massless particles all travel at the speed at which causality can propagate through the universe (though they themselves do not experience speed because they do not experience time). The fact we reference it as the speed of light is just scientific idiom
The basic principle is that space itself is expanding—the empty stuff between all those stars, planets, and galaxies. Not only that, but the expansion of space itself? It’s accelerating. And the further away something is, the faster it’s accelerating. Allow this play out over time and with acceleration unbounded, space itself starts to expand faster than the speed of light. And since the speed of light is our universal speed limit… that means the far reaches of universe will forever be out of reach. Eventually our own night sky will go dark (minus the stuff closest to us like the sun, Milky Way, and Andromeda) as more and more objects continue their acceleration away from us.
One consequence of which is that if intelligent life arises in the Milky Way again after that point, they will likely have no way of knowing that there ever were other galaxies beyond the local group.
We're somewhat lucky to be around to see the universe when it's comparatively young.
It's like a balloon. Take two distances when balloon is empty. Let's say furthest points of each other (10cm) and halfway points (5cm)
When you inflate the balloon the distance of furthest points increased to 20cm. But the 5cm is 8cm and not 10cm.
The same in space. the further you go the faster it expands. The event horizon is the point where the expansion is faster than the speed of light. Any photon emitted will never reach us. The crazy thing is that according to some theories even the space between atoms will be beyond the event horizon.
Yes, that's an effect, just like capturing the photon and using it to build up an image is an effect. You're thinking along the wrong axis, though. The issue isn't "effect" vs "no effect". The issue is "then" vs "now".
The light that we see today left them 10 billion years ago. Any light that leaves them now[1] will never reach us. And any light emitted by us now will never reach them.
---
[1] Yes, I know, "now" is not really a useful concept when dealing with large velocities in Special Relativity. I don't think my overall point is destroyed by that, though. If you can find a more rigorous way to state what I am trying to say, please do.
I think "now" is an underrated concept in physics, as in a universal ordering of events, regardless of what order position and relative velocity cause them to be observed. If there is indeed a universal "now", then faster-than-light travel need not lead to time travel.
Yes, but we need to change how we treat each other.
I for once don't care about Nato or trading oil in USD, but nevertheless the US government thinks it has the right to make everybodys life miserable if people don't care enough about those things. Same goes for the trade war between China and the US. Nobody except some corporations and greedy politicians really care.
This shit needs to end. It is literally killing us all. And we must stop buying and producing crap we don't really need.
This is an emergent quality of ourselves (or a life) and not a coincidence or few personal fads. It will continue to be until we re-engineer ourselves and/or create a substituting species.
It might be emergent, natural even, but we are better than this. A lot of balls have been continuously dropped by a lot of people. Small changes at the right time could've ended up with humanity prospering in the 21st century. Now between hypercapitalism, religious extremism and runaway climate change the James Webb telescope is one of the few things that still let's me keep faith in humanity.
Well, life also sucked plenty for our ancestors (including the dinosaurs being hit by an asteroid and whatnot), so from a big-picture perspective that isn’t a very convincing objection. I guess you could construct scenarios where we fuck it up in a way that causes more suckage for sentient beings in the future then there was ever in the past, but that’d be moving goalposts.
You don't know that. Sure there's lots of worlds there and even more space between them, but size and scale isn't everything. Meaning may be unevenly distributed. Universe could be fractal. Those could be minor variations of the same world, rather than many different ones. They could have laws of physics distinct from ours for all we know.
This makes me imagine a little part of the Mandelbrot set saying it is irrelevant because it's such a small part of the whole. But in truth, the Mandelbrot set is not the Mandelbrot set without every part of it (the math would be off). We are the universe. As Alan Watts said: "an apple tree apples, and the universe peoples".
What an incredible image and achievement for countless people who worked on this over the years. It’s impossible not to sit and wonder what life might be like in any of these galaxies.
I was lucky enough to get to tour the clean room where they were fabricating the microshutter array at Goddard many years ago. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures, since this was before smart phones. I think that really helps contextualize just how long the development process of something like this is. And maybe what it could be capable of if it was built with today's technology.
To me, most remarkable is how little different they are.
One is 140 hours, the other 12 hours. So, mainly this calibrates JWST as 10-20x Hubble sensitivity, with noticeably but not radically improved sharpness, but radically less noise. Presumably the actually important results will be the much longer exposures and the redder things Hubble can't see at all, or that would be obscured by noise.
JWST depends very heavily on gravitational lensing and perverse perspective (where things far enough away look bigger because the space they were in grew) to get usefully detailed images. Which is a Good Thing, because we could not have lofted a big enough mirror to get such images directly.
In The Future, when we loft hundreds of flat mirrors maintained in an array hundreds of km across, all this will seem pretty pedestrian. But those will have to be out by Neptune so the whole thing can be kept cold enough to be useful. Powering it will be a tricky affair: it will probably need beamed microwave power from a correspondingly large solar concentrator, or maybe D-3He FRC reactor if that can be got working. Then, getting the data home will be a project of its own.
In the more distant future, civilization will have shifted major operations and population out there to take advantage of access to the thermodynamically most irreducible resource, cold. That probably cannot happen until after p-11B fusion is mastered. (To be clear: people won't move out there, much; rather, population out there will outgrow Earth's.)
What will we glean from your Neptune array that would justify the massive cost? Won’t it just look like this but sharper images of galaxies and earlier and earlier in time? What are we trying to discover then? Surely almost everything about the universe that we can know from our location will be known then. Your Neptune array sounds like one of those bird watchers with the huge telephoto lens just hoping to capture a great shot of yet another bird the world has seen millions of times.
“All science is either physics or stamp collecting.”
At a certain size it becomes possible to directly image exoplanets in enough detail to tell us what the weather looks like, atmospheric composition, perhaps even images of extraterrestrial cities.
Ultralarge telescopes would let you directly image surface features of exoplanets.
There's plenty of stuff we'd like to look at outside our solar system. We could send interstellar probes to local systems, but sending probes to stars thousands of light years away is still going to be pretty tough, even with far future technology.
The hypothetical question to a hypothetical situation deserves a hypothetical answer.
There would be no massive cost. It would be a project affordable by the curious humans/robots/organizations of The Future. Automation will construction and manage the array, and the civilization building such a structure will be post-scarcity to some extent.
There is much less speckle noise in the JWST image, but the relative sizes of light patches roughly match.
The lack of speckle noise is what will be important, because the dim stuff that doesn't show here is what will turn up in longer exposures, and not be obscured by it.
Let's assume space is curved in a way that it only appears vast and it's an irregular curvature. How would you be able to demonstrate if an object in a photograph is another cycle around the curvature?
For instance, you could be seeing an already observed object at a different incoming angle and thus a trivial comparison would be defeated
I'd think if this question is answerable you could also perhaps demonstrate there are no cycles or repetitions, even irregular ones.
I don't know though, anyone that knows things care to opine? I'm assuming this is theoretically arguable, such as a proof by contradiction or something.
We can do things to measure the curvature of the universe, everything so far points to complete flatness so if there is curvature and the universe is closed, the radius is much much larger than the observable universe as to make it appear “locally” flat, where “local” is something like 100 billion light years.
By looking at the remnant of the big bang -- measuring the power spectrum of the remaining cosmic microwave background energy, across large angles of sky.
Right, but how can you test assertions at that scale? In the same way that there's quantum physics, couldn't there be non-local or galaxy sized physics working in different ways? If not why?
Rewriting the rules would probably solve a few mysteries. It sounds like an easy out
You look for physics that explains multiple things. A new law to explain each specific phenomena and only that one is probably wrong. You want laws with several unrelated testable consequences.
Physics that boils down to “things are just the way we see them” isn’t much of an explanation. Physics that doesn’t change based on location, direction, scale, etc is important to look for.
Why isn't helpful? If it accounts for natural phenomena without mystery sauce then we're good. Our familiarity with the millennium long physics of parsec sized systems is rather limited and to presume there aren't factors at play that have variance at that size is rather presumptive.
Has there been an effort to sincerely discard everything, observe only large scale celestial systems, then try to derive things all over again? You may just get classical models but then again, you might not.
I'm familiar with that "shutup we know everything" response and not only do I find it thoroughly unconvincing but it's never been correct given a long enough timeline of scientific inquiry.
The idea that we can demonstrate all the physics of the universe given the surface of a single planet sounds a little irrational.
Look at the Voyager 1 AACS data for instance. Is the data incorrect or is it correct and things are just different in interstellar space?
There have been plenty of attempts to modify gravity, general relativity, etc to explain the anomalous behavior at very large scales. None so far has come close to a satisfying solution which has testable effects and doesn’t introduce inconsistencies with already observed behavior.
Clearly there is a gap between theory and reality, the best candidate right now is that there is a whole lot of matter out there which so far we can only observe through its gravitational effects and which does not interact with electromagnetism.
Without much knowledge it’s easy to say “why don’t you just” but plenty of people have been trying and finding nothing that works or explains anything.
Right, dark matter sounds like nonsense. Talk about undetectable magic stuff.
It sounds like I'll have to find this out the hard way and do the work myself.
I'd be much more likely to believe there's a bizarre almost random mess of an X factor that makes everything nonlinear and noneuclidean at a large enough scale and the reason there's inconsistencies is because there's observational mutations that aren't as obvious as gravitational lensing
Let's see if I'm motivated enough to do it.
I'm not expecting to find anything new but instead to satisfy my skepticism. I can be ridiculous on the level of demonstration I demand to be convinced
You’ll have to learn a whole lot more about what we do know before your skepticism about what we don’t know holds much weight with other people.
The Higgs field and neutrinos are examples of things which we now know definitely exist but are extremely difficult to detect or barely interact with the EM which makes up most of our experience of the universe.
Skepticism of something we can’t see simply because we can’t see it should be tempered because there is plenty of precedence for difficult to detect things which end up very confidently real.
PBS Space Time YouTube videos are a good way to get initial exposure to a lot of what we know now.
I know how you feel, i have some questions about black holes i haven’t found satisfying answers to myself. The only solution is going to be teaching myself general relativity math and doing some simulations, which may or may not ever happen.
That's the best original source I've found so far. It's also unclear to me if these images are largely from Spitzer or Hubble or a combination of data from both.
The directions of the spiral galaxies seem to align tangential to the middle of the photo. Is that just an artifact of the image, or is there a reason behind it?
The ones that are obviously spirals appear tangential, but that's more or less saying the same thing. If they weren't tangential they wouldn't be ovious spirals.
You can find spirals that are more side-on, and galaxies that are completely side-on you can't tell one way or the other.
[edit] Unless you're referring to the gravity lensing effect, in which case the lensing smear is tangential to to the lensing cluster of galaxies, due to how lensing works.
361 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 367 ms ] threadI was wondering which of the 5 photos [1] they'd tease today (remaining 4 are coming tomorrow). My guess was also gonna be the deep field one, especially since it maps nicely to the well known Hubble photo. But now it begs the question, how does this one compare to the Hubble one in terms of scale/angle.
[1] https://petapixel.com/2022/07/08/nasa-shares-the-5-cosmic-ta...
“The combined mass of this galaxy cluster acts as a gravitational lens, magnifying much more distant galaxies behind it.”
According to the Hubble Site post [2]: "...the Hubble Deep Field image covers a speck of the sky only about the width of a dime 75 feet away"
Edit: So that same page for the Webb image states 2.4 arcmin across, compared to ~3.4 arcmin for the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image [3]
[1] https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/038/01G...
[2] https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/1996/news-1996...
[3] http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/98-the-universe/ga...
(like https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:16042014_Bokeh.jpg, https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/52126)
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Hersch...
(Herschel was located in the same L2 point as JWST).
All around, just strange and poorly executed from a communications/media standpoint. Completely inexcusable for an organization like this.
Seems to me like people are overly sensitive about missteps like this nowadays; too quick to lob criticism.
Feels like this is just the usual case of the 'old guard' being completely out of touch.
Three struts, but because of light diffraction, six spikes.
There are much smaller diffraction effects which are in part due to the mirrors, but these are far smaller and not immediately evident. Both apply largely to foreground point sources, which is to say, relatively nearby stars. Distant objects with an appreciable size don't produce diffraction spikes.
Read: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/james-webb-spikes/
(Via: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32063220)
Of course, the JWST without its struts and its mirrors wouldn't be much of a telescope! So the diffraction spikes are a part of doing business and also have the helpful side effect of allowing us to quickly know which objects are stars vs galaxies, since only the former have the really prominent spikes.
interestica 5 minutes ago [flagged] [dead] | prev [–]
What a weirdly botched release. 90 min delay with nothing more than a title screen and a terrible repeating music track. (When it was at least an opportunity to display material related to the project for those stopping in due to media coverage). A labyrinth of a website with interlinking and crosslinking throughout. Web links that come up blank. And an unprepared accompanying statement for the image given off the cuff by the director. Weird press conference -- 'who is this for?' All around, just strange and poorly executed from a communications/media standpoint. Completely inexcusable for an organization like this.
Ever wonder why lots of people don't give a hoot about science funding? This is why, you promise them something important and exceptional and then deliver a low quality product. Again, I refer to the streaming event, not the telescope/science team.
I imagine the NASA conference tomorrow may give more clarity, e.g. perhaps today's announcement was a last-minute press op that wasn't sufficiently planned? Maybe the full NASA briefing will be better.
With that said, I think it's fair to keep this discussion separate so as not to overshadow the very real and tremendous accomplishment we're witnessing today. Obviously the manner of the announcement is insignificant compared to the result itself, and I hope everyone involved is very rightly proud.
Not really, I'd argue it's just as important.
Without solid PR for current projects, future projects get less funding.
I get that's how they earn their bread but from my point of view it comes off as awkward and dishonest, it does the complete opposite of getting me excited about the release.
People who are more interested in the photo and the technology that produced it than public communications, would be my guess.
No updates via their channels on the delay. Their linked live stream had no mention of delay and just displayed general unrelated content (about the ISS). In situ comments were also turned off so there was no way to corroborate with others that there was a delay or if one was even in the right space for the release. Even when eventually ready to go live, they made no update -- those that got to see from the beginning were those that happened to be keeping the feed open for the 90mins.
In the press conference, it was a screen of a screen displayed within a screen. When the 3 highlighted members were featured, their names were thus too small to be seen on the feed.
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
This was not the first awkward science press event and it won’t be the last. It’s annoying but that is not noteworthy; life is full of annoyances. A new deep image from a new space telescope is what is really noteworthy.
Also from a practical perspective, complaining here won’t reach the people you actually want to influence. NASA staff are publicly available; if you want to complain, look up their email addresses and write to them directly. You might even get a reply!
Full-Res 4537x4630 PNG (28.51 MB): https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01G7JJADTH90FR98AKKJFKSS0B.png
Hubble's capture of the same area: https://bigthink.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/smacs0723-73... and a gif comparison vs the JWST: https://i.redd.it/9uyhwijeo0b91.gif posted by /u/WhatEvery1sThinking on Reddit.
Since I don't, I made a poster of crops: https://twitter.com/KyeFox/status/1546629778349907968
Instrument internals are painted black and heavily baffled, but nothing in optics is perfect. Dithering the direction the telescope is pointed in and image stacking should cancel out most optical artifacts, but internal reflections will be worse for bright objects like stars, which JWST probably isn't usually going to be observing with the imaging instruments.
https://i.ibb.co/D8dW6v5/jwst.webp
[0] https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/038/01G...
("...the assigned colors are: Red: F444W Orange: F356W Green: F200W + F277W Blue: F090W + F150W")
Steps to reproduce:
The large white elliptical galaxies in the center of the image are in the "foreground", while the orange-ish galaxies are much farther away in the background. This is why the light from the more distant galaxies is curved and distorted by the foreground objects, creating the lensing effect that we see.
[1] https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2022/07/Webb_s_fir... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32063214
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Deep_Field
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-Deep_Field
[2] https://archive.stsci.edu/prepds/relics/ ("For each cluster, the team observed to 5-orbit depth with ACS and WFC3/IR")
(If you want to verify [2] is talking about the same photo, you can retrieve it from the "SMACS J0723.3-7327" row, from the "Color Images" column/field).
EDIT: nasa.gov says 95 mins, so ~8 hrs.
https://hst-docs.stsci.edu/hsp/the-hubble-space-telescope-pr...
- "HST GO observing time is counted in terms of orbits. Each 96-minute orbit contains a certain amount of useful time when the target can be observed, called the orbital visibility period..."
12.5 hours total exposure for the JWST image, "weeks" for the HST image
EDIT: Doesn't look like it is -- it is from a more recent 2019-published study of SMACS J0723.3-732 as part of the Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey (RELICS).
Some background info in this paper:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.05007.pdf
Although that paper does mention that this image is the deepest image of the Universe to date, and that the Fine Guidance Sensor image may be the second deepest, both exceeding the Hubble Deep Field image.
And this image is “roughly the size of a grain of sand held at arms length” of the night sky.
For a more specific measurement: NASA says 2.4 arcminutes across[0].
[0]: https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/038/01G...
We know it is anywhere from 0 (originated elsewhere and found its way here) to 1 (originated here and is guaranteed to originate given the conditions). I don't think we have enough data points to determine improbability yet.
What is the probability of life originating in the universe? We know it is definitely greater than 0..
It would still occur quite a bit, and some planets with a protective field likely still produce simple life forms.
https://blog.wolfd.me/hubble-jwst/
The .gif comparison was a bit... upsetting since the color palettes are so limited and the resolution is so low, so it really didn't put JWST _or_ Hubble in a good light.
There is some extra "pinpoint" clarity in the Webb image, but it doesn't show (for instance) a bunch of new stuff, I was surprised at that.
The new stuff is of course faint and small. Otherwise Hubble would have seen it!
https://ibb.co/zPvxrFT
https://ibb.co/NYsp9Jw
https://ibb.co/wJDQ7XM
https://ibb.co/yf8RTM2
https://ibb.co/d72g9Jx
https://ibb.co/BBPvFZf
https://ibb.co/567Z9RC
https://ibb.co/Hpm43Xr
https://ibb.co/JBhmCxL
https://ibb.co/PMYqnXb
Just imagine how much more vivid they would appear once the technology progresses ever further.
Do you mean these specific galaxies? If not, you can see many galaxies in amazing detail with very modest equipment. If you know what you're looking for you can faintly see Andromeda with the naked eye.
https://esahubble.org/images/?search=%22Deep+Field%22
There are images on that link that I haven't seen before and the level of detail is pretty amazing too.
There's a great animation of it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_co...
Download: 80MP/140MB https://drive.google.com/file/d/150VhXVEfYXmr70LrrZxQ50pU0u5...
1.4GP/2.5GB (note: not every image viewer can handle a file this big) https://drive.google.com/file/d/14x__QDUmrIvLnlxoSOksu3mgpeX...
Hubble's own Deep Field image required about 140 hours of imaging (divided amongst 4 bandwidths and ~150 separate imaging events). Webb's own view took a little over 12 hours. I was expecting nearer and brighter objects to be first targets. Impressive as heck.
Though of course, Hubble paved the way and showed that deep-field imaging is useful and provides insights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Deep_Field
For comparison the SMACS 0723 image used for reference in the JWST image target selection nnouncement recently:
https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2022/07/hlsp_relics_hst...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32064504
This is how these images of very dim, distant galaxies are created without foreground stars blowing out the whole image.
This image stacking technology has crept in to smartphone cameras in the last handful of years, most prominently as "night mode".
If you're interested in distant constant objects, then near-transient signals can be safely ignored and removed.
The wikipedia article has a lot of details, including masking the CR's, removing some scattered light from Earth, the use of multiple color bands, and super-resolution using slightly different pointing from frame to frame. All this processing is done at the single-image level, and motivates dividing up the exposure time into chunks.
The ~340 exposures were taken over about 10 days and spread over 4 color bands. The typical integration time for one exposure appears to have been about 30 minutes.
There are a few factors involved AFAIU:
- You don't want to be shooting through the Milky Way's own primary mass as nearby dust and gas will obstruct more distant objects.
- "Nearby" objects --- stars within the Milky Way, reasonably nearby galaxies --- might also tend to blow out the image. Though for the most part these end up being point sources. It's artefacts such as spikes which give the most obstruction.
In the case of the JWST, the fact that it's looking into the infrared means that it can see object which are literally invisible to Hubble regardless of how long the exposure.
The question of why space is black (or alternatively: why it's not uniformly light) is known as Olber's Paradox or "the dark-sky paradox", and dates back to the time of Keppler. Effectively: the universe has a finite age, and there is not an infinite number of stars (or other light sources) as one goes back in time.
https://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/questions/que...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers%27_paradox
There is a uniform illumination of the Universe that can be detected, as microwave radiation, known as the cosmic backgroud radiation. That occurs well below JWST's sensor range (0.6–28.3 μm), however, with a peak wavelength of about 1 mm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_background_radiation
(a) The universe is infinite, but has been (and will always be) stretching faster than would allow light from galaxies too far away to ever reach us.
(b) The universe is infinite and not even stretching, but there is enough (dark?) matter in it to eventually block any ray of light coming from infinitely far away.
The goals are to maximise light capture (the objects being imaged are dim and distant), whilst miniising any degredation from other factors. JWST doesn't ahve to deal with skyglow, daylight, or satellite interference. It may still be seeing other solar system bodies (depending on where it's aiming), but mostly would be subject to cosmic-ray interference, probably impacting on the light sensor itself.
Since those are essnetially instantaneous and randomly distributed with time, by "stacking" images and filtering out transient events (taking an average or median brightness AFAIU).
I'm not sure to what extend HDR is used in astronomical imaging.
There is a lot of post-processing and palette selection to apply colours to what are just intensity maps at a given frequency.
https://astrobackyard.com/tutorials/stack-exposures/
https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/astrophotography/astropho...
[0] "In this case, the assigned colors are: Red: F444W Orange: F356W Green: F200W + F277W Blue: F090W + F150W"
https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/038/01G...
[1] https://archive.stsci.edu/prepds/relics/
I'm excited to see what the other photos look like but even more, for what the next 10+ years of space photography might reveal.
If I could wish for one thing, it'd be some vast improvement in black hole photography. While I appreciate the recent achievements in even being able to capture a black hole on film, I imagine a photo as life-like as the simulated black hole in Interstellar would make it hard to not get emotional seeing such an incomprehensibly powerful object in great detail.
This would only happen for very small blackholes, and even then from your point of view time would act normally.
Yes, but it's irrelevant.
> My 1000 years number is a rough guess, and it could be shorter or even longer than that. I was thinking since physics breaks down that you would have to endure being spaghettified whilst still being able to feel and have nerves intact and thinking capacity.
For an outside observer it might seem like a long time, but not for you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rTv9wvvat8
The Star Trek vision of the future is a handful of contacted races, all very distinct.
This.. this is nearly a continuum of possibility. Political systems? This image has them all, and every intermediate, outlier, and axis explored. Warfaring? There are more than likely a million battles being fought in this image, right "now". A trillion-trillion soldiers and weapons systems of every kind, and every kind in between. Flying tanks. Hover artillery. Underwater helicopters. Nanobots. Microbots. In-between bots. Every kind of bot.
The numbers are just... unimaginable. You could chart every aspect of these civilizations with smooth graphs, much like the Stellar classification chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_classification
In a lot of cases, we infer the presence of planets by making very precise measurements of relative velocities of stars (using red/blue shift of light) and making note of periodic wobbles that indicate that its position is being affected by planets.
> Webb will also carry coronagraphs to enable direct imaging of exoplanets near bright stars. The image of an exoplanet would just be a spot, not a grand panorama, but by studying that spot, we can learn a great deal about it. That includes its color, differences between winter and summer, vegetation, rotation, weather...How is this done? The answer again is spectroscopy.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HR_8799_Orbiting_Exo...
Of course the above doesn’t account for lensing and who knows what else, but you get the idea. (If my math is correct)
https://www.eso.org/public/images/potw1846a/
So even though the JWST is a larger scope, Hubble's visible wavelength photos are higher resolution than JWST's longer wavelength photos.
imagine a distant galaxy, say ~1billion light years away (not 13 like in this new image).
imagine a civilization in this galaxy.
any information takes ~1billion years to travel between us and them.
but say ten years pass from our frame of reference here on Earth.
in those ten years on Earth, did the civilization ~1billion years away also experience roughly ~10years from their point of view?
I guess what I'm trying to ask is, in the time it took me to write this comment, could there be some part of the universe experiencing a much faster rate of time, relative to us? Did a civilization rise and fall somewhere? Does this question even make sense, or is it one of those things where relativity is so unintuitive that asking a question like this is nonsensical?
Also I remember a short story where scientists created a mini universe then find that they can take over conscious beings in this reality, and influence them. So a few minutes to the scientists is thousands of years in this simulation, and they use it to get new technology and such.
Uncountable universes(multiverse) are born when Supreme consciousness Vishnu breathes out. Inside each universe God Bharma is born with the responsibly of managing the affair. Brahma lives for his 100 years which is roughly 311 billion years. During this time many mini cycles of creation and dissolution takes place. When Bharma finally dies after completing his 100 years,that particular universe dies with him. After another 311 billion years another Brahma is born again and universe restarts. When supreme god Vishnu finally breathes in, multiverse stop existing and creation end till the time supreme god breathes out again.
I am sure there were others great civilizations. But they are not here any more to tell the tale.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_units_of_time
[1] https://www.myindiamyglory.com/2017/09/11/nalanda-9-million-...
Hindus were obsessed with zero and infinity and to them it was the same as god itself. Shanti mantra(used to wish well to all living being) from īśopaniṣad says.
> ओं | पूर्णमदः पूर्णमिदं पूर्णात्पूर्णमुदच्यते । पूर्णस्य पूर्णमादाय पूर्णमेवावशिष्यते ॥
> oṃ | pūrṇamadaḥ pūrṇamidaṃ pūrṇātpūrṇamudacyate | pūrṇasya pūrṇamādāya pūrṇamevāvaśiṣyate ||
> That is Whole and this is Whole, the perfect has come out of the perfect; having taken the perfect from the perfect, only the perfect remains. Let there be Peace, Peace, Peace.
Verse above describes God superficially but it also describes zero and infinity[0]. This small text with only 18 verses and yet it is so profound. Similarly Buddhist philosophy which also came out from India is based on Shunya(zero).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isha_Upanishad
Both true and false. Most of the killing and destruction was done by the pagans to themselves. The pagan wars were no joke. Here in the Indian subcontinent itself there was a war called 'Kalinga War', the death and destruction was just so much and complete. Nothing remained standing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalinga_War
This is just to be honest one of many hundreds to thousands of wars in India alone. Paganism was mostly destroyed by its own people.
Having said that every civilization have had destructive infights. People fought for money, power,fame etc.
But that doesn't mean they destroyed each other's knowledge system, temples, and monuments. That's is only true for Abrahmic philosophy which stresses on destroying the culture and knowledge systems of the conquered.
No, I don't have any example of any king in Europe, Middle East or North Africa who fought a war as destructive as Kalinga war. And that's just one war.
>>Having said that every civilization have had destructive infights. People fought for money, power,fame etc.
Causes for the fall of any civilisation are always internal, eventually you just get take over by somebody better.
>>That's is only true for Abrahmic philosophy which stresses on destroying the culture and knowledge systems of the conquered.
Would love read more upon 'Abrahmic Philosophy'.
Kalinga deaths are recorded to be 150000. I will suggest reading about the crusades and others religious wars to find how many were killed. Please also read about how Bible was used to justify the slavery and subjugation of pagans.
Indian conquered upto Cambodia, Persians conquered a big part of known world yet didn't engage in erasing the native population or the culture of conquered. But in contrast almost entire population of native Americans were annihilated. They practically do not exist.
> Would love read more upon 'Abrahmic Philosophy'.
First 2 commandments of bible summarises the doctrine/philosophy.
Yes. The same civilization! (wait for it)
> or is it one of those things where relativity is so unintuitive that asking a question like this is nonsensical?
The latter. One of the most unintuive aspects of relativity is the relativity of simultaneity. Basically, the order in which events happen in different places in the universe is relative. Imagine event A happening in galaxy A, event B happening in galaxy B, and event C happening in galaxy C.
From the POV of one observer, events might happen in order ABC, while for other they may happen in order BCA.
This doesn't mean that the observers simply see the events in different order because of their distance to them--it means that even when taking distance into account, one event happened before the other.
So yes, a civilization rose while you wrote that comment. It also fell... from the POV of someone else.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity
If a civilization was trying to compete with another in another galaxy, could they coalesce as much matter as they could into a single star, increasing gravity, and relativistically experience more time in their star system than the other civilization?
Then for gravity, the less gravity that civilization experiences the slower time moves for them relative to their competitor.
So I think the goal would be to send star matter to the other civilization so their time slows down relatively speaking.
I’m no expert, though. Happy to take corrections.
http://www.leapsecond.com/great2016a/index.htm
If interstaller thought us anything, the closer you are to a black hole the slower time gets. When they got close to the black hole they only spent a few hours there but lost years compared to our frame of reference.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation
But here's something fun: the space between us and them is stretching, so in a billion years when the light arrives at our position, the time between photons will be longer than when they left (so things will appear slower) and the photons will be at a longer wavelength making it more red.
Like maybe a few nanoseconds over ten minutes difference. One could probably come up with a standard deviation statistic, but whatever it would be would be way below a perceptual difference. (We can measure the difference in the flow of time with a clock on a table compared to another on the floor, but of course that’s way less than could be felt)
(I'm not certain on this point, but I think some of the high-redshift galaxies we can see in deep field images are now causally disconnected. We're receiving some of their old light, but we can't send anything back anymore -- they've faded out into infinite redshift).
edit: Here's an article about this idea by Ethan Siegel, and its HN discussion thread (thanks 'petilon for helping me remember the author):
https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/the-disappearing-unive... ("The Disappearing Universe")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7896776 (64 comments)
“ In an expanding universe, the speed of expansion reaches — and even exceeds — the speed of light, preventing signals from traveling to some regions. A cosmic event horizon is a real event horizon because it affects all kinds of signals, including gravitational waves, which travel at the speed of light.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_horizon
Massless particles all travel at the speed at which causality can propagate through the universe (though they themselves do not experience speed because they do not experience time). The fact we reference it as the speed of light is just scientific idiom
Your friend right next to you who was one foot away is now two feet. The absolute distance just grew by 1 foot, a rate of 1 foot/second.
Your friend across the pool who was 10 feet is now 20 feet away. Absolute distance just grew by 10 feet, or a rate of 10 ft/sec.
More at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_the_universe
We're somewhat lucky to be around to see the universe when it's comparatively young.
https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/the-disappearing-unive... ("The Disappearing Universe")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7896776 (64 comments)
The photons emitted by that galaxy effect us, here in ours because we can see them.
It's the ones we can't see that are disconnected.
The light that we see today left them 10 billion years ago. Any light that leaves them now[1] will never reach us. And any light emitted by us now will never reach them.
---
[1] Yes, I know, "now" is not really a useful concept when dealing with large velocities in Special Relativity. I don't think my overall point is destroyed by that, though. If you can find a more rigorous way to state what I am trying to say, please do.
I for once don't care about Nato or trading oil in USD, but nevertheless the US government thinks it has the right to make everybodys life miserable if people don't care enough about those things. Same goes for the trade war between China and the US. Nobody except some corporations and greedy politicians really care.
This shit needs to end. It is literally killing us all. And we must stop buying and producing crap we don't really need.
It is wholly possible that life was well on its way before the strike that produced the moon re-melted the whole planet down to constituent elements.
Ugh. Apologies :)
Do whatever iterations of technology fit within that time window, have a few in progress to keep up the cadence.
One is 140 hours, the other 12 hours. So, mainly this calibrates JWST as 10-20x Hubble sensitivity, with noticeably but not radically improved sharpness, but radically less noise. Presumably the actually important results will be the much longer exposures and the redder things Hubble can't see at all, or that would be obscured by noise.
JWST depends very heavily on gravitational lensing and perverse perspective (where things far enough away look bigger because the space they were in grew) to get usefully detailed images. Which is a Good Thing, because we could not have lofted a big enough mirror to get such images directly.
In The Future, when we loft hundreds of flat mirrors maintained in an array hundreds of km across, all this will seem pretty pedestrian. But those will have to be out by Neptune so the whole thing can be kept cold enough to be useful. Powering it will be a tricky affair: it will probably need beamed microwave power from a correspondingly large solar concentrator, or maybe D-3He FRC reactor if that can be got working. Then, getting the data home will be a project of its own.
In the more distant future, civilization will have shifted major operations and population out there to take advantage of access to the thermodynamically most irreducible resource, cold. That probably cannot happen until after p-11B fusion is mastered. (To be clear: people won't move out there, much; rather, population out there will outgrow Earth's.)
“All science is either physics or stamp collecting.”
There's plenty of stuff we'd like to look at outside our solar system. We could send interstellar probes to local systems, but sending probes to stars thousands of light years away is still going to be pretty tough, even with far future technology.
There would be no massive cost. It would be a project affordable by the curious humans/robots/organizations of The Future. Automation will construction and manage the array, and the civilization building such a structure will be post-scarcity to some extent.
The lack of speckle noise is what will be important, because the dim stuff that doesn't show here is what will turn up in longer exposures, and not be obscured by it.
Or we use the Sun as a gravitational lens.
James Webb Space Telescope White House Briefing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32062139 - July 2022 (82 comments)
For instance, you could be seeing an already observed object at a different incoming angle and thus a trivial comparison would be defeated
I'd think if this question is answerable you could also perhaps demonstrate there are no cycles or repetitions, even irregular ones.
I don't know though, anyone that knows things care to opine? I'm assuming this is theoretically arguable, such as a proof by contradiction or something.
Rewriting the rules would probably solve a few mysteries. It sounds like an easy out
Physics that boils down to “things are just the way we see them” isn’t much of an explanation. Physics that doesn’t change based on location, direction, scale, etc is important to look for.
Easy outs probably aren’t helpful.
Has there been an effort to sincerely discard everything, observe only large scale celestial systems, then try to derive things all over again? You may just get classical models but then again, you might not.
I'm familiar with that "shutup we know everything" response and not only do I find it thoroughly unconvincing but it's never been correct given a long enough timeline of scientific inquiry.
The idea that we can demonstrate all the physics of the universe given the surface of a single planet sounds a little irrational.
Look at the Voyager 1 AACS data for instance. Is the data incorrect or is it correct and things are just different in interstellar space?
Clearly there is a gap between theory and reality, the best candidate right now is that there is a whole lot of matter out there which so far we can only observe through its gravitational effects and which does not interact with electromagnetism.
Without much knowledge it’s easy to say “why don’t you just” but plenty of people have been trying and finding nothing that works or explains anything.
It sounds like I'll have to find this out the hard way and do the work myself.
I'd be much more likely to believe there's a bizarre almost random mess of an X factor that makes everything nonlinear and noneuclidean at a large enough scale and the reason there's inconsistencies is because there's observational mutations that aren't as obvious as gravitational lensing
Let's see if I'm motivated enough to do it.
I'm not expecting to find anything new but instead to satisfy my skepticism. I can be ridiculous on the level of demonstration I demand to be convinced
The Higgs field and neutrinos are examples of things which we now know definitely exist but are extremely difficult to detect or barely interact with the EM which makes up most of our experience of the universe.
Skepticism of something we can’t see simply because we can’t see it should be tempered because there is plenty of precedence for difficult to detect things which end up very confidently real.
PBS Space Time YouTube videos are a good way to get initial exposure to a lot of what we know now.
I know how you feel, i have some questions about black holes i haven’t found satisfying answers to myself. The only solution is going to be teaching myself general relativity math and doing some simulations, which may or may not ever happen.
Unfortunately we don’t always have the luxury of that level of demonstration in physics
https://archive.stsci.edu/prepds/relics/
https://archive.stsci.edu/prepds/relics/color_images/smacs07...
That's the best original source I've found so far. It's also unclear to me if these images are largely from Spitzer or Hubble or a combination of data from both.
You can find spirals that are more side-on, and galaxies that are completely side-on you can't tell one way or the other.
[edit] Unless you're referring to the gravity lensing effect, in which case the lensing smear is tangential to to the lensing cluster of galaxies, due to how lensing works.