22 ms·

Deepest infrared image of universe

1136 points by l- 4y ago

cwkoss 4y ago
Can someone with some astronomy knowledge explain why the center of the images has a bunch of concentric-ish smudges? What does it mean?
- atulvi 4y ago
  Gravitational lensing
  - cwkoss 4y ago
    So, are the smudges' light coming from behind the objects in the center?
    - skykooler 4y ago
      Yes, they are being warped and magnified by the central cluster of galaxies.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32063057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32063057
- dvh 4y ago
  The smudges are proof that Einstein was correct
ehsankia 4y ago
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. [1] https://petapixel.com/2022/07/08/nasa-shares-the-5-cosmic-targets-of-james-webbs-first-photos/ https://petapixel.com/2022/07/08/nasa-shares-the-5-cosmic-ta...
- aosaigh 4y ago
  Is the lensing the result of a single large galaxy in the middle that is “closer” or many galaxies?
  - rbanffy 4y ago
    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)
  - dprice1 4y ago
    According to https://www.newscientist.com/article/2328132-james-webb-space-telescopes-first-deep-field-image-is-stunning/ 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."
    - abc_lisper 4y ago
      So where are those galaxies? Are they not visible in infrared? Or has light bent so much that those galaxies are not visible?
      - smolder 4y ago
        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.
  - yrgulation 4y ago
nabla9 4y ago
It would be nice to see comparison to the Herschel space observatory images from the same location. https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Herschel https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Hersch...
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  Here’s a Hubble comparison: https://twitter.com/erinbiba/status/1546624746598563840 https://twitter.com/erinbiba/status/1546624746598563840
  - nabla9 4y ago
    Hubble 4.0 m2 (43 sq ft) Herschel 9.6 m2 (103 sq ft) JWST 25.4 m2 (273 sq ft) Hubble had ~40% of the Herschel's collecting area and Herchel had 40% of the JWST's collecting area. (Herschel was located in the same L2 point as JWST).
de6u99er 4y ago
Images like this remind how irrelevant we are in the cosmos. The rest of the universe won't even notice when we are gone.
- kepler1 4y ago
  So much more important that we make the best of the time we have, for each other, while we can make a difference for ourselves.
  - de6u99er 4y ago
    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.
    - wruza 4y ago
      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.
      - Comevius 4y ago
        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.
- zw123456 4y ago
  Man, wouldn't it suck if it turned out the only place in that vastness that supported sentient life was Earth and we fucked it up?
b0sk 4y ago
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."
- seedees 4y ago
  Webb's view of the universe? And how do we know :-/
- yrgulation 4y ago
  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.
  - wilsonnb3 4y ago
    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
    - yrgulation 4y ago
      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.
- ehsankia 4y ago
  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?)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
interestica 4y ago
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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- davesque 4y ago
  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.
  - interestica 4y ago
    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).
- dotnet00 4y ago
pelagicAustral 4y ago
Superb! I just saw this on Sky News and came here first, I just knew the source was going to be around.
spullara 4y ago
I really hate that you can see artifacts from the hex mirrors.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  Explanation: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/james-webb-spikes/ https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/james-webb-spikes/
- penneyd 4y ago
  Hubble had diffractions spikes too, four of them from the struts holding the secondary mirror.
- _moof 4y ago
  They aren't from the mirrors; they're from the struts.
  - _xerces_ 4y ago
    They're from the mirrors, just one is from the struts.
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      False. 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/ https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/james-webb-spikes/ (Via: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32063220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32063220)
    - Osmium 4y ago
      This infographic does a nice job showing which are from the struts and which from the mirrors: https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/01G529MX46J7AFK61GAMSHKSSN https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/01G529MX46J7... 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.
spullara 4y ago
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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- gizajob 4y ago
  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?
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    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.
    - gizajob 4y ago
Temporal_Trout 4y ago
Higher Resolution Images available here: https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/038/01G7JGTH21B5GN9VCYAHBXKSD1 https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/038/01G... Full-Res 4537x4630 PNG (28.51 MB): https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01G7JJADTH90FR98AKKJFKSS0B.png https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01G7JJADTH90FR98AKKJFKSS0B.png Hubble's capture of the same area: https://bigthink.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/smacs0723-73.jpg https://bigthink.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/smacs0723-73... and a gif comparison vs the JWST: https://i.redd.it/9uyhwijeo0b91.gif https://i.redd.it/9uyhwijeo0b91.gif posted by /u/WhatEvery1sThinking on Reddit.
- Kye 4y ago
  If I knew JavaScript I would make a bookmarklet that makes it slowly pan over the full-res version, stopping periodically. Since I don't, I made a poster of crops: https://twitter.com/KyeFox/status/1546629778349907968 https://twitter.com/KyeFox/status/1546629778349907968
- darzu 4y ago
  Same comparison zoomed into my favorite part without motion: https://twitter.com/sprigland/status/1546633629236748294 https://twitter.com/sprigland/status/1546633629236748294
- skrause 4y ago
  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.
  - ffhhj 4y ago
    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?
    - 4y ago
dredmorbius 4y ago
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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Deep_Field 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_acs_smacs0723-73_multi_v1_color-800x725.jpg https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2022/07/hlsp_relics_hst...
- pkaye 4y ago
  I imagine in the future they will also run the JWST with a long exposure and the Hubble to get even more details?
  - tandr 4y ago
    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?
    - Keyframe 4y ago
      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.
    - prpl 4y ago
      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
      - 4y ago
sharkweek 4y ago
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.
- gravitate 4y ago
  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?!
  - sharkweek 4y ago
    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.
    - gravitate 4y ago
      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.
    - colechristensen 4y ago
yrgulation 4y ago
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!
- elihu 4y ago
  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.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  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 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.
  - egfx 4y ago
    genuinely curious if the advancements of AI image generation and editing tools can assist with using this data to produce some approaching realism.
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      Not with this generation of telescopes. We’re talking about a few pixels worth of data. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HR_8799_Orbiting_Exoplanets.gif#mw-jump-to-license https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HR_8799_Orbiting_Exo...
- 4y ago
nerbert 4y ago
So many lensing effects!!
2bitencryption 4y ago
this image makes me curious about something: 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?
- prox 4y ago
  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.
- groffee 4y ago
  There's a Star Trek episode addresses this sort of https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Blink_of_an_Eye_(episode) https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Blink_of_an_Eye_(episod... 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.
  - drieddust 4y ago
    Hindus imagined this thousand of years ago. 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.
Gatsky 4y ago
Wow, clearest example of gravitational lensing I've ever seen.
ISL 4y ago
What an incredible achievement for our civilization.
sylens 4y ago
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.
justinc-md 4y ago
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.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  It would be really nice if they were to create a continual satellite telescope program where they launched an updated version every five years or so. Do whatever iterations of technology fit within that time window, have a few in progress to keep up the cadence.
dang 4y ago
Related: James Webb Space Telescope White House Briefing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32062139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32062139 - July 2022 (82 comments)
darzu 4y ago
Here's a Hubble vs JWST comparison zoomed into my favorite part: https://twitter.com/sprigland/status/1546633629236748294/photo/1 https://twitter.com/sprigland/status/1546633629236748294/pho...
- ncmncm 4y ago
  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.)
  - JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
    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.”
kristopolous 4y ago
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.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  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.
  - pkaye 4y ago
    How did the measure the curvature of the universe?
    - mikeInAlaska 4y ago
      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.
      - kristopolous 4y ago
        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
jaaron 4y ago
For comparison, here are some of the best previous images from this area of the sky: https://archive.stsci.edu/prepds/relics/ https://archive.stsci.edu/prepds/relics/ https://archive.stsci.edu/prepds/relics/color_images/smacs0723-73.html 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.
- perihelions 4y ago
  WFC3 and ACS are names of Hubble cameras, so I believe these are just Hubble. (Looking mainly at your second link)
alfiedotwtf 4y ago
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?
- Cogito 4y ago
  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.
  - alfiedotwtf 4y ago
    Ah, OK thanks... Now I see what gravity lensing means!
unzadunza 4y ago
Let's say the universe is 14 billion years old and the galaxies in this image are 13 billion years old. The largest the universe could have been at the time is 2 billion light-years across if the universe expanded at the speed of light after the Big Bang. However, if we pointed the Webb in the exact opposite direction we would see galaxies that are 26 billion light years away from those in this image. How is this possible if the galaxy could have only been 2 billion light years across 13 billion years ago? Also, if the Milky Way galaxy was somewhere within the 2 billion light year diameter sphere of the universe at that time (it wasn't because it isn't that old), the light from this image should have hit us a long time ago.
- krallja 4y ago
  Unfortunately, times don’t add like that under relativity
- mason55 4y ago
  If these questions interest you, I’d recommend the book “The End of Everything” by Katie Mack. Ostensibly it’s about the end of the universe but to explain the various possibilities she has to first explain the kind of things you’re talking about.
- cheshire137 4y ago
  Is this because space is expanding? 68 km per second per megaparsec, see https://phys.org/news/2015-02-fast-universe.html https://phys.org/news/2015-02-fast-universe.html, so the observable universe is more light years big than its age.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dkarp 4y ago
  Prepare to have your mind blown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_the_universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_the_universe TLDR: expansion of the universe doesn't care about the speed of light and the universe is believed to have inflated very fast in its early moments
- 4y ago
perihelions 4y ago
To anyone looking for information about the infrared color mapping, it's buried on the webbtelescope.org page: - "In this case, the assigned colors are: Red: F444W Orange: F356W Green: F200W + F277W Blue: F090W + F150W" https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/038/01G7JGTH21B5GN9VCYAHBXKSD1?news=true https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/038/01G... You can reference JWST's NIRCam filters here. The longest wavelength this image is 4.4 µm, and the shortest is 0.9 µm (900 nm). https://jwst-docs.stsci.edu/jwst-near-infrared-camera/nircam-instrumentation/nircam-filters https://jwst-docs.stsci.edu/jwst-near-infrared-camera/nircam... ("NIRCam Filters")
- aimor 4y ago
  Thank you! I was going to ask before I saw this.
- SomeHacker44 4y ago
  Will they eventually release "raw" images, that is, from each filter at high bit depths? Each exposure if there are multiple? I don't know much but it would be interesting to see how each channel differs, for example, and what that means scientifically.
  - prpl 4y ago
    yes - probably already is, i’d the dataset is actually public now (MAST archive probably). Usually is in FITS format with associated metadata. PNG is obviously useless for numerical analysis.
victor22 4y ago
axg11 4y ago
Incredible photo from a scientific perspective. The team must be ecstatic that everything went to plan so far. Truthfully I don’t think a random member of the public would be impressed by this photo. I’m surprised that they led with this during their biggest moment of public reach. Can they remove the diffraction artifacts by rotating and re-acquiring, then doing some kind of diff/averaging? They are very apparent and distracting.
- pkaye 4y ago
  They might clean it up further in the future when they have more time. For the science they care more about the spectroscopy anyway.
supernova87a 4y ago
As someone with formerly a connection to the astronomy world, I am certainly glad to see attention on this achievement. But I also know that the science + research community should also be grateful for the general public's complete lack of memory or understanding of the science, that keeps them coming back and fawning over press releases like this and in a way keeps the field funded. (The cynic in me says thank the lord for the new people each year who get to rediscover the beauty of old images for the first time.) For all they know, the image released today could've been a snapshot from WFPC2 HDF 20 years ago or ACS UDF from 10 years ago -- the images look basically the same to the outsider's eye! Very little about the image itself visually tells you that it's in the IR. Much like some medical research "breakthrough" that gets touted that could've been the same announcement from 20 years ago, no lay person really knows the difference. Still, sincere congratulations on decades of waiting. edit: No, I am not saying that the images are a repost... obviously. Read my message more carefully.
- voz_ 4y ago
  Wrong all over. Check the other comments, they are def not the same. The condescending and cynical tone also destroys any inquisitiveness. "Lay" people can absolutely tell the difference.
  - supernova87a 4y ago
    You're taking me a little too literally, I'm not saying that the public is being duped. Of course this is a new image from JWST. And this comment isn't really for general public consumption or to deflate the general public's enthusiasm for the achievement. I'm just saying that the field benefits from new discoveries that seem just like old discoveries being embraced by the general public even though they won't really know the full difference or underlying science. I think every field has this to some extent. So, ok, here you go -- I will take you up on your challenge. Which one of these is from the UDF 15 years ago, and which is from today's announcement? https://imgur.com/a/kga5CxY https://imgur.com/a/kga5CxY https://imgur.com/a/Wf1vHio https://imgur.com/a/Wf1vHio
    - 4y ago
alberth 4y ago
Aren’t the rays of lights that makes a star pattern in the images an artifact of how JWST is capturing the light? Shouldn’t that be scrubbed and removed? Also, why do so many galaxies looks “stretched” as if there was motion blur? EDIT: why the downvotes? I don’t understand. I’m just asking some basic space / telescope questions.
- seabrookmx 4y ago
  Gravitational lensing. It's also visible in the Hubble images of the same region if you look elsewhere in this thread.
- kadoban 4y ago
  > Aren’t the rays of lights that makes a star pattern in the images an artifact of how JWST is capturing the light? I believe so, yes. > Shouldn’t that be scrubbed and removed? Not sure. They may have different levels of processing or different entire processes based in what properties of the image they're after maybe? It also seems possible that any processing to remove those would lose information. > Also, why do so many galaxies looks “stretched” as if there was motion blur? I believe that's the gravitational lensing. We're looking at _very_ far away things, and slightly less far away, for this one, (and just out of frame) there's a galaxy cluster that's magnifying the image and distorting it a bit.
mwattsun 4y ago
My car broke down in Delta, Utah in Jan 2020. I was helped by beryllium miners who worked the mines in the area [1]. Beryllium does not expand or contract when heated or cooled, making it ideal for the frame of the James Webb telescope. Coincidentally, I broke down inside a cosmic ray telescope array named with the same last name as mine: The Lon and Mary Watson Cosmic Ray Center [2] The people in that area are probably celebrating right now, just not with alcohol because they are mostly Mormon. If any of you are on Hacker News reading this, thank you! [1] https://www.upr.org/utah-news/2022-03-25/beryllium-is-a-critical-mineral-mined-in-utah https://www.upr.org/utah-news/2022-03-25/beryllium-is-a-crit... [2] https://www.space.com/36975-telescope-array-site-tour-photo-gallery.html https://www.space.com/36975-telescope-array-site-tour-photo-...
- prpl 4y ago
  Only a few (maybe 2) people who work on TA are from Delta. Some were there for night shifts for days to a week or two - most of it was to be automated. A few of the researchers were mormon, most are not. Most drank (even if at Curleys). It’s mostly different astrophysics but still - it’s astrophysics
  - mwattsun 4y ago
    It would have been cool to meet some researchers and have a chat, but I spent a few days hanging out with the town folk who live in Delta. It's a nice town. I went for pizza in a bar bowling alley. They're not all Mormon and for all I know modern Mormons drink. I counted a Baptist and a Catholic church. The bar unironically had a poster from the 70's or 80's that no one felt the need to update: https://imgur.com/a/s6Y6O1J https://imgur.com/a/s6Y6O1J I was very lucky, because I had just driven on 70 in the Eastern part of Utah where there was no service for about 120 miles (remember that monolith? out there), and I was just about to head out into the Great Basin. In other words, I broke down a couple of miles from the only repair shop in hundreds of thousands of square miles.
    - prpl 4y ago
      yep, not a coincidence there - you have to run atmospheric fluorescence detectors in a dark, unpopulated desert, far from light pollution ideally
codezero 4y ago
Welp, there’s a sure fire way to bring me to tears.
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
I know this is whistling in the wind, but the Webb telescope just fills me with such hope and excitement. I feel generally so down about the state of the world, but when I think about the sheer complexity of the Webb telescope and how it has basically gone as well as anyone could hope, it just makes me happy. Deep thanks and gratitude to the huge number of people who worked so hard on this project.
- RajT88 4y ago
  I am giddy about what we will see once they start pointing it at nearby exoplanets.
  - adastra22 4y ago
    Slightly brighter dots. You’re not going to be able to get a multi pixel image of an exoplanet with JWST. There is good exoplanet science to be done, like atmosphere spectroscopy. But not direct imaging, other than as points of light.
- zaphod12 4y ago
  Thank you for this. It really is heartening to see amazing science done for its sake. Something not horrible for a change.
- tomgp 4y ago
  Me too! A lot of the recent advances in space travel/ exploration whilst techically impressive (space X's reusable rockets, starlink etc.) just don't really spark joy or wonder in the way that the Webb telscope has for me.
- sizzle 4y ago
  Looking at a picture like this makes me feel deeply that we can’t only be the single intelligent life out there in space. Also, makes me want to start watching Star Trek again
- potamic 4y ago
  Reminds me of this - https://cdn.quotesgram.com/img/53/30/1253009639-7ab83ab4c9b8bbf2dc1372b7ac732433.jpg https://cdn.quotesgram.com/img/53/30/1253009639-7ab83ab4c9b8...
causality0 4y ago
They seem to be really dancing around the fact of whether or not this is greater angular resolution than the Hubble ultra-deep field with qualifiers like "greater than Hubble in infrared" or talking about how fast it was. Does this image resolve smaller details than the ultra deep field or not?
- asmithmd1 4y ago
  It is complicated and wavelength dependent. In near infrared, Hubble and JWST have about the same resolution. As the frequency moves further into infrared, JWST is better than Hubble. The other things that affect how clear an image is are “point spread function” - how much light gets scattered. And how steady the telescope can be held on one spot. Both of these capabilities are better for JWST than Hubble.
  - causality0 4y ago
    Again the evasive language. I'm not talking about the technical specs, I'm talking this dang picture. This one. Are the finest details in this picture finer than the finest details in the Hubble ultra-deep field?
    - asmithmd1 4y ago
      Are “the finest details” of an X-ray of your wrist finer than a screen grab from a camera phone video of your wrist?
    - RandomBK 4y ago
      This picture is not the actual image data from JWST, but rather an interpretation of infrared data. If you're only asking about the details in this picture, my understanding is that JWST is better though not by orders of magnitude. However the actual answer is that the two telescopes are not easily comparable in this fashion.
- doctoboggan 4y ago
  Hubble is able to take higher resolution (smaller angular resolution) pictures in it's optimum wavelengths. Even though JWST has a larger light bucket, the photons its capturing are longer wavelength so the end result is a lower resolution. You asked in another comment "Are the finest details in this picture finer than the finest details in the Hubble ultra-deep field?". In a sense, yes since the finest details in this photo are of a wavelength that Hubble isn't sensitive too, so they are visible here but do not show up in an equivalent Hubble shot.
dav_Oz 4y ago
This is an extremely mind-boggling image, there is a lot going on here. So first, one has to keep in mind that this is a composite with images from different wavelengths (exposure time 12.5h), so there could be some artefacts from processing. Now to the fun part. It is a deep field image i.e. a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground The focus is on the galaxy cluster (SMACS 0723) approx. 4.7 billion light years away (incidentally, earth's very age) The stars causing clear diffraction spikes[0] are way in the foreground ... but the "reddish fuzzy twirled objects" are lensed through the galaxy cluster itself revealing what is way way back (the "redder the farer") --- that's where the NIRCam of the JWST now gives us some really juicy details of galaxies 13 (!) billions light years away, only a couple 100.000 years after the Big Bang. Compare this to the faint Hubble image [1]! For anyone irritated by the distortions: gravitational lensing can cause a lot of weird patterns e.g. a "Einstein Cross"[2] [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction_spike https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction_spike [1]https://i.redd.it/9uyhwijeo0b91.gif https://i.redd.it/9uyhwijeo0b91.gif [2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_Cross https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_Cross
kumarvvr 4y ago
This image makes me feel a lot of emotions. I don't know if its the same with others. Just wow. The technical achievement is out of this world. Kudos to the whole team. But the image is just.. Each of those points of light is a galaxy, we are looking at trillions and trillions of galaxies, across the entirety of the visible sky (this image is from an area equivalent to a grain of rice held at an arms length). It is terrifying to even fathom if we are alone or not. Also, the Hubble Deep Field image took weeks. This took a mere 12.5 hours of exposure.
- digitalsankhara 4y ago
  You are not alone [1]. My emotional response to this image made my spine tingle and was almost tearful. Just trying to appreciate what I'm looking at will take me some time, appreciating all of the hard work and raw science that went into this less so. As an 11 year old, watching the moon landing, I lived and breathed all things NASA and space related. Now, as I near retirement, I feel just as privileged to view this image in the same way. [1] I wonder if the work of the JWT will impact Drake's equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
  - antognini 4y ago
    It absolutely will. One of the big advances in the past two decades was the discovery of exoplanets, and at this point we've discovered enough of them that we can get reasonable constraints on their frequency (along with sketchier constraints on Earth-like planets). That alone removed one of the major uncertainties in the Drake equation. JWST will be able to make far better measurements of exoplanet atmospheres than any other telescope, so this should start to constrain how many Earth-like planets have atmospheres with biological signatures. These constraints will remove the next big uncertainty in the Drake equation.
    - digitalsankhara 4y ago
      Absolutely. The resolution of the spectral plots in yesterday's images was amazing.
michaelsbradley 4y ago
So beautiful! So many questions to be asked and natural mysteries to be probed by man made in the image and likeness of God. May such research give glory to Him who made the Pleiades and Orion (Amos 5:8), for His greater glory and the salvation of souls.
throwawaylinux 4y ago
What can scientists learn from this image?
throwawaycuriou 4y ago
Inspired tonight by this photo, I made this little tribute piece on my synthesizer: Webb Awakens https://drive.google.com/file/d/14mdhZ8yPdKarB8GHbWXToY9v_03v9NUU/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/14mdhZ8yPdKarB8GHbWXToY9v_03...
sidcool 4y ago
With all disagreements I see in this community, space has never been one of them. This is a beautiful image. Kudos NASA.
- blinding-streak 4y ago
  This is true, except for dark matter and dark energy debates :)
- pawsforthought 4y ago
  It’s somehow more grounding than every other human concern, if only for the fact that we have no ability to affect it even one iota (beyond our solar system). The greatest light show in all existence.
dotancohen 4y ago
Most of the curving stretched, I'm assuming gravitational-distorted, galaxies in that photograph seem to have a similar focal point for their curve. Surely that is not a coincidence. Is the body in the center of the photograph gravitationally distorting the light from the further objects all the way out to the edge of the photograph?
mbank 4y ago
This ain't new it's just the background image of beloved pc game "master of orion II" :)
myaccount80 4y ago
With this resolution, I’m wondering if we could see some artificial structures made by Type 3 civilizations, or some side effects of them. Or maybe we will feel even more lonely.
- tgtweak 4y ago
  Maybe if we zoom in closely on a shiney object we will be able to see into the past...
- Angelore 4y ago
  What are the odds that such an image (Dyson sphere for example) would actually be released? It's not like we have a raw feed from the Webb. On the other hand, suppressing it doesn't make much sense either, since the age of such an object would only indicate that something was, rather than is.
tgtweak 4y ago
The story behind the original capture by the Hubble is really incredible. This is kind of cool but I don't think JWT will have the same "damn this changes our entire perspective about the universe" potential.
- dougmwne 4y ago
  That depends on what kind of exoplanet atmospheres we find out there: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/nasa-s-webb-will-seek-atmospheres-around-potentially-habitable-exoplanets https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/nasa-s-webb-will-s...
seydor 4y ago
is the glare real? (and why is it hexagonal). Are the smudges due to gravitational lensing or motion?
- ginko 4y ago
  >is the glare real? (and why is it hexagonal). The hexagonal star pattern is an artifact of the struts holding the secondary mirror. More details here: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/james-webb-spikes/ https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/james-webb-spikes/
captaincrowbar 4y ago
"From our home on the Earth, we look out into the distances and strive to imagine the sort of world into which we are born. Today we have reached far out into space. Our immediate neighborhood we know rather intimately. But with increasing distance our knowledge fades, and fades rapidly, until at the last dim horizon we search among ghostly errors of observations for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial. The search will continue. The urge is older than history. It is not satisfied and it will not be suppressed." -- Edwin Hubble
28304283409234 4y ago
All that vastness, those infinite planets. And we just keep f*.. up the only known one with life.
andy_ppp 4y ago
It seems almost impossible to believe there appears to be very little out there in terms of alien signals. Demis Hassabis’ argument that we would see lots of signals by now if other life had reached human intelligence levels seems persuasive to me. Almost seems more terrifying if we eventually explore the universe to find nothing else there…
dandare 4y ago
What is this "star" effect on som of the prominent stars? Why is it only on some of the light sources? What causes it in a lense in general and why is it not correct for in JWST? Thanks!
- fbanon 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction_spike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction_spike
fbanon 4y ago
It's a bit smudgy. Maybe they should try to clean the lens?
Naracion 4y ago
"Webb’s image covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground" I had absolutely no idea that these images we see of the universe / galaxy were such a small sliver of the vast possibility. That is incredible. Does anybody know: 1. What is the field of vision on this image, and 2. what is the widest field of vision image that we have captured of the universe?
- ozgung 4y ago
  I found the image surprisingly empty considering this is a 2D projection of an enormous 3D volume. The size of a grain of sand from arms length but size of hundreds of galaxies at the far end.
yosito 4y ago
I am wondering if the galaxies that look extruded are actually stretched like that from some crazy force or black hole or something, or if the light is distorted.
- wgx 4y ago
  It's gravitational lensing from the cluster of galaxies around the center of the image. Source: https://twitter.com/ProfBrianCox/status/1546722072499462147 https://twitter.com/ProfBrianCox/status/1546722072499462147
belter 4y ago
Don't know why, but feeling a bit emotional about the image. Besides this first one, whole set will be released in 3 hours: https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/countdown.html https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/countdown.html
vishnugupta 4y ago
Press conference of unveiling of images is 20 minutes away https://youtu.be/nmMRMIE3MGw https://youtu.be/nmMRMIE3MGw
deleted 4y ago
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alionaguseva 4y ago
How about 1.4 Gigapixel image of the galaxy? The new photos are stunning. Let's Enhance's AI made them super high res for you to enjoy the clearest view of the Universe. Download: 80MP/140MB https://drive.google.com/file/d/150VhXVEfYXmr70LrrZxQ50pU0u5H9VXV/view?usp=sharing 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__QDUmrIvLnlxoSOksu3mgpeXj3mjQ/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/14x__QDUmrIvLnlxoSOksu3mgpeX...

1136 points by l- 4y ago

Can someone with some astronomy knowledge explain why the center of the images has a bunch of concentric-ish smudges? What does it mean?

atulvi 4y ago
Gravitational lensing
- cwkoss 4y ago
  So, are the smudges' light coming from behind the objects in the center?
  - skykooler 4y ago
    Yes, they are being warped and magnified by the central cluster of galaxies.
dredmorbius 4y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32063057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32063057
dvh 4y ago
The smudges are proof that Einstein was correct

ehsankia 4y ago

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. [1] https://petapixel.com/2022/07/08/nasa-shares-the-5-cosmic-targets-of-james-webbs-first-photos/ https://petapixel.com/2022/07/08/nasa-shares-the-5-cosmic-ta...

aosaigh 4y ago
Is the lensing the result of a single large galaxy in the middle that is “closer” or many galaxies?
- rbanffy 4y ago
  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)
- dprice1 4y ago
  According to https://www.newscientist.com/article/2328132-james-webb-space-telescopes-first-deep-field-image-is-stunning/ 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."
  - abc_lisper 4y ago
    So where are those galaxies? Are they not visible in infrared? Or has light bent so much that those galaxies are not visible?
    - smolder 4y ago
      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.
- yrgulation 4y ago

nabla9 4y ago

It would be nice to see comparison to the Herschel space observatory images from the same location. https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Herschel https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Hersch...

ceejayoz 4y ago
Here’s a Hubble comparison: https://twitter.com/erinbiba/status/1546624746598563840 https://twitter.com/erinbiba/status/1546624746598563840
- nabla9 4y ago
  Hubble 4.0 m2 (43 sq ft) Herschel 9.6 m2 (103 sq ft) JWST 25.4 m2 (273 sq ft) Hubble had ~40% of the Herschel's collecting area and Herchel had 40% of the JWST's collecting area. (Herschel was located in the same L2 point as JWST).

de6u99er 4y ago

Images like this remind how irrelevant we are in the cosmos. The rest of the universe won't even notice when we are gone.

kepler1 4y ago
So much more important that we make the best of the time we have, for each other, while we can make a difference for ourselves.
- de6u99er 4y ago
  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.
  - wruza 4y ago
    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.
    - Comevius 4y ago
      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.
zw123456 4y ago
Man, wouldn't it suck if it turned out the only place in that vastness that supported sentient life was Earth and we fucked it up?

b0sk 4y ago

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."

seedees 4y ago
Webb's view of the universe? And how do we know :-/
yrgulation 4y ago
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.
- wilsonnb3 4y ago
  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
  - yrgulation 4y ago
    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.
ehsankia 4y ago
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?)

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interestica 4y ago

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.

deleted 4y ago
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davesque 4y ago
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.
- interestica 4y ago
  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).
dotnet00 4y ago

pelagicAustral 4y ago

Superb! I just saw this on Sky News and came here first, I just knew the source was going to be around.

spullara 4y ago

I really hate that you can see artifacts from the hex mirrors.

ceejayoz 4y ago
Explanation: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/james-webb-spikes/ https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/james-webb-spikes/
penneyd 4y ago
Hubble had diffractions spikes too, four of them from the struts holding the secondary mirror.
_moof 4y ago
They aren't from the mirrors; they're from the struts.
- _xerces_ 4y ago
  They're from the mirrors, just one is from the struts.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    False. 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/ https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/james-webb-spikes/ (Via: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32063220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32063220)
  - Osmium 4y ago
    This infographic does a nice job showing which are from the struts and which from the mirrors: https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/01G529MX46J7AFK61GAMSHKSSN https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/01G529MX46J7... 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.

spullara 4y ago

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.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gizajob 4y ago
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?
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  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.
  - gizajob 4y ago

Temporal_Trout 4y ago

Higher Resolution Images available here: https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/038/01G7JGTH21B5GN9VCYAHBXKSD1 https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/038/01G... Full-Res 4537x4630 PNG (28.51 MB): https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01G7JJADTH90FR98AKKJFKSS0B.png https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01G7JJADTH90FR98AKKJFKSS0B.png Hubble's capture of the same area: https://bigthink.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/smacs0723-73.jpg https://bigthink.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/smacs0723-73... and a gif comparison vs the JWST: https://i.redd.it/9uyhwijeo0b91.gif https://i.redd.it/9uyhwijeo0b91.gif posted by /u/WhatEvery1sThinking on Reddit.

Kye 4y ago
If I knew JavaScript I would make a bookmarklet that makes it slowly pan over the full-res version, stopping periodically. Since I don't, I made a poster of crops: https://twitter.com/KyeFox/status/1546629778349907968 https://twitter.com/KyeFox/status/1546629778349907968
darzu 4y ago
Same comparison zoomed into my favorite part without motion: https://twitter.com/sprigland/status/1546633629236748294 https://twitter.com/sprigland/status/1546633629236748294
skrause 4y ago
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.
- ffhhj 4y ago
  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?
  - 4y ago

dredmorbius 4y ago

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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Deep_Field 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_acs_smacs0723-73_multi_v1_color-800x725.jpg https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2022/07/hlsp_relics_hst...

pkaye 4y ago
I imagine in the future they will also run the JWST with a long exposure and the Hubble to get even more details?
- tandr 4y ago
  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?
  - Keyframe 4y ago
    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.
  - prpl 4y ago
    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
    - 4y ago

sharkweek 4y ago

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.

gravitate 4y ago
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?!
- sharkweek 4y ago
  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.
  - gravitate 4y ago
    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.
  - colechristensen 4y ago

yrgulation 4y ago

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!

elihu 4y ago
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.
ceejayoz 4y ago
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 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.
- egfx 4y ago
  genuinely curious if the advancements of AI image generation and editing tools can assist with using this data to produce some approaching realism.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    Not with this generation of telescopes. We’re talking about a few pixels worth of data. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HR_8799_Orbiting_Exoplanets.gif#mw-jump-to-license https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HR_8799_Orbiting_Exo...
4y ago

nerbert 4y ago

So many lensing effects!!

2bitencryption 4y ago

this image makes me curious about something: 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?

prox 4y ago
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.
groffee 4y ago
There's a Star Trek episode addresses this sort of https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Blink_of_an_Eye_(episode) https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Blink_of_an_Eye_(episod... 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.
- drieddust 4y ago
  Hindus imagined this thousand of years ago. 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.

Gatsky 4y ago

Wow, clearest example of gravitational lensing I've ever seen.

ISL 4y ago

What an incredible achievement for our civilization.

sylens 4y ago

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.

justinc-md 4y ago

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.

colechristensen 4y ago
It would be really nice if they were to create a continual satellite telescope program where they launched an updated version every five years or so. Do whatever iterations of technology fit within that time window, have a few in progress to keep up the cadence.

dang 4y ago

Related: James Webb Space Telescope White House Briefing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32062139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32062139 - July 2022 (82 comments)

darzu 4y ago

Here's a Hubble vs JWST comparison zoomed into my favorite part: https://twitter.com/sprigland/status/1546633629236748294/photo/1 https://twitter.com/sprigland/status/1546633629236748294/pho...

ncmncm 4y ago
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.)
- JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
  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.”

kristopolous 4y ago

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.

colechristensen 4y ago
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.
- pkaye 4y ago
  How did the measure the curvature of the universe?
  - mikeInAlaska 4y ago
    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.
    - kristopolous 4y ago
      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

jaaron 4y ago

For comparison, here are some of the best previous images from this area of the sky: https://archive.stsci.edu/prepds/relics/ https://archive.stsci.edu/prepds/relics/ https://archive.stsci.edu/prepds/relics/color_images/smacs0723-73.html 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.

perihelions 4y ago
WFC3 and ACS are names of Hubble cameras, so I believe these are just Hubble. (Looking mainly at your second link)

alfiedotwtf 4y ago

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?

Cogito 4y ago
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.
- alfiedotwtf 4y ago
  Ah, OK thanks... Now I see what gravity lensing means!

unzadunza 4y ago

Let's say the universe is 14 billion years old and the galaxies in this image are 13 billion years old. The largest the universe could have been at the time is 2 billion light-years across if the universe expanded at the speed of light after the Big Bang. However, if we pointed the Webb in the exact opposite direction we would see galaxies that are 26 billion light years away from those in this image. How is this possible if the galaxy could have only been 2 billion light years across 13 billion years ago? Also, if the Milky Way galaxy was somewhere within the 2 billion light year diameter sphere of the universe at that time (it wasn't because it isn't that old), the light from this image should have hit us a long time ago.

krallja 4y ago
Unfortunately, times don’t add like that under relativity
mason55 4y ago
If these questions interest you, I’d recommend the book “The End of Everything” by Katie Mack. Ostensibly it’s about the end of the universe but to explain the various possibilities she has to first explain the kind of things you’re talking about.
cheshire137 4y ago
Is this because space is expanding? 68 km per second per megaparsec, see https://phys.org/news/2015-02-fast-universe.html https://phys.org/news/2015-02-fast-universe.html, so the observable universe is more light years big than its age.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dkarp 4y ago
Prepare to have your mind blown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_the_universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_the_universe TLDR: expansion of the universe doesn't care about the speed of light and the universe is believed to have inflated very fast in its early moments
4y ago

perihelions 4y ago

To anyone looking for information about the infrared color mapping, it's buried on the webbtelescope.org page: - "In this case, the assigned colors are: Red: F444W Orange: F356W Green: F200W + F277W Blue: F090W + F150W" https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/038/01G7JGTH21B5GN9VCYAHBXKSD1?news=true https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/038/01G... You can reference JWST's NIRCam filters here. The longest wavelength this image is 4.4 µm, and the shortest is 0.9 µm (900 nm). https://jwst-docs.stsci.edu/jwst-near-infrared-camera/nircam-instrumentation/nircam-filters https://jwst-docs.stsci.edu/jwst-near-infrared-camera/nircam... ("NIRCam Filters")

aimor 4y ago
Thank you! I was going to ask before I saw this.
SomeHacker44 4y ago
Will they eventually release "raw" images, that is, from each filter at high bit depths? Each exposure if there are multiple? I don't know much but it would be interesting to see how each channel differs, for example, and what that means scientifically.
- prpl 4y ago
  yes - probably already is, i’d the dataset is actually public now (MAST archive probably). Usually is in FITS format with associated metadata. PNG is obviously useless for numerical analysis.

victor22 4y ago

axg11 4y ago

Incredible photo from a scientific perspective. The team must be ecstatic that everything went to plan so far. Truthfully I don’t think a random member of the public would be impressed by this photo. I’m surprised that they led with this during their biggest moment of public reach. Can they remove the diffraction artifacts by rotating and re-acquiring, then doing some kind of diff/averaging? They are very apparent and distracting.

pkaye 4y ago
They might clean it up further in the future when they have more time. For the science they care more about the spectroscopy anyway.

supernova87a 4y ago

As someone with formerly a connection to the astronomy world, I am certainly glad to see attention on this achievement. But I also know that the science + research community should also be grateful for the general public's complete lack of memory or understanding of the science, that keeps them coming back and fawning over press releases like this and in a way keeps the field funded. (The cynic in me says thank the lord for the new people each year who get to rediscover the beauty of old images for the first time.) For all they know, the image released today could've been a snapshot from WFPC2 HDF 20 years ago or ACS UDF from 10 years ago -- the images look basically the same to the outsider's eye! Very little about the image itself visually tells you that it's in the IR. Much like some medical research "breakthrough" that gets touted that could've been the same announcement from 20 years ago, no lay person really knows the difference. Still, sincere congratulations on decades of waiting. edit: No, I am not saying that the images are a repost... obviously. Read my message more carefully.

voz_ 4y ago
Wrong all over. Check the other comments, they are def not the same. The condescending and cynical tone also destroys any inquisitiveness. "Lay" people can absolutely tell the difference.
- supernova87a 4y ago
  You're taking me a little too literally, I'm not saying that the public is being duped. Of course this is a new image from JWST. And this comment isn't really for general public consumption or to deflate the general public's enthusiasm for the achievement. I'm just saying that the field benefits from new discoveries that seem just like old discoveries being embraced by the general public even though they won't really know the full difference or underlying science. I think every field has this to some extent. So, ok, here you go -- I will take you up on your challenge. Which one of these is from the UDF 15 years ago, and which is from today's announcement? https://imgur.com/a/kga5CxY https://imgur.com/a/kga5CxY https://imgur.com/a/Wf1vHio https://imgur.com/a/Wf1vHio
  - 4y ago

alberth 4y ago

Aren’t the rays of lights that makes a star pattern in the images an artifact of how JWST is capturing the light? Shouldn’t that be scrubbed and removed? Also, why do so many galaxies looks “stretched” as if there was motion blur? EDIT: why the downvotes? I don’t understand. I’m just asking some basic space / telescope questions.

seabrookmx 4y ago
Gravitational lensing. It's also visible in the Hubble images of the same region if you look elsewhere in this thread.
kadoban 4y ago
> Aren’t the rays of lights that makes a star pattern in the images an artifact of how JWST is capturing the light? I believe so, yes. > Shouldn’t that be scrubbed and removed? Not sure. They may have different levels of processing or different entire processes based in what properties of the image they're after maybe? It also seems possible that any processing to remove those would lose information. > Also, why do so many galaxies looks “stretched” as if there was motion blur? I believe that's the gravitational lensing. We're looking at _very_ far away things, and slightly less far away, for this one, (and just out of frame) there's a galaxy cluster that's magnifying the image and distorting it a bit.

mwattsun 4y ago

My car broke down in Delta, Utah in Jan 2020. I was helped by beryllium miners who worked the mines in the area [1]. Beryllium does not expand or contract when heated or cooled, making it ideal for the frame of the James Webb telescope. Coincidentally, I broke down inside a cosmic ray telescope array named with the same last name as mine: The Lon and Mary Watson Cosmic Ray Center [2] The people in that area are probably celebrating right now, just not with alcohol because they are mostly Mormon. If any of you are on Hacker News reading this, thank you! [1] https://www.upr.org/utah-news/2022-03-25/beryllium-is-a-critical-mineral-mined-in-utah https://www.upr.org/utah-news/2022-03-25/beryllium-is-a-crit... [2] https://www.space.com/36975-telescope-array-site-tour-photo-gallery.html https://www.space.com/36975-telescope-array-site-tour-photo-...

prpl 4y ago
Only a few (maybe 2) people who work on TA are from Delta. Some were there for night shifts for days to a week or two - most of it was to be automated. A few of the researchers were mormon, most are not. Most drank (even if at Curleys). It’s mostly different astrophysics but still - it’s astrophysics
- mwattsun 4y ago
  It would have been cool to meet some researchers and have a chat, but I spent a few days hanging out with the town folk who live in Delta. It's a nice town. I went for pizza in a bar bowling alley. They're not all Mormon and for all I know modern Mormons drink. I counted a Baptist and a Catholic church. The bar unironically had a poster from the 70's or 80's that no one felt the need to update: https://imgur.com/a/s6Y6O1J https://imgur.com/a/s6Y6O1J I was very lucky, because I had just driven on 70 in the Eastern part of Utah where there was no service for about 120 miles (remember that monolith? out there), and I was just about to head out into the Great Basin. In other words, I broke down a couple of miles from the only repair shop in hundreds of thousands of square miles.
  - prpl 4y ago
    yep, not a coincidence there - you have to run atmospheric fluorescence detectors in a dark, unpopulated desert, far from light pollution ideally

codezero 4y ago

Welp, there’s a sure fire way to bring me to tears.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

I know this is whistling in the wind, but the Webb telescope just fills me with such hope and excitement. I feel generally so down about the state of the world, but when I think about the sheer complexity of the Webb telescope and how it has basically gone as well as anyone could hope, it just makes me happy. Deep thanks and gratitude to the huge number of people who worked so hard on this project.

RajT88 4y ago
I am giddy about what we will see once they start pointing it at nearby exoplanets.
- adastra22 4y ago
  Slightly brighter dots. You’re not going to be able to get a multi pixel image of an exoplanet with JWST. There is good exoplanet science to be done, like atmosphere spectroscopy. But not direct imaging, other than as points of light.
zaphod12 4y ago
Thank you for this. It really is heartening to see amazing science done for its sake. Something not horrible for a change.
tomgp 4y ago
Me too! A lot of the recent advances in space travel/ exploration whilst techically impressive (space X's reusable rockets, starlink etc.) just don't really spark joy or wonder in the way that the Webb telscope has for me.
sizzle 4y ago
Looking at a picture like this makes me feel deeply that we can’t only be the single intelligent life out there in space. Also, makes me want to start watching Star Trek again
potamic 4y ago
Reminds me of this - https://cdn.quotesgram.com/img/53/30/1253009639-7ab83ab4c9b8bbf2dc1372b7ac732433.jpg https://cdn.quotesgram.com/img/53/30/1253009639-7ab83ab4c9b8...

causality0 4y ago

They seem to be really dancing around the fact of whether or not this is greater angular resolution than the Hubble ultra-deep field with qualifiers like "greater than Hubble in infrared" or talking about how fast it was. Does this image resolve smaller details than the ultra deep field or not?

asmithmd1 4y ago
It is complicated and wavelength dependent. In near infrared, Hubble and JWST have about the same resolution. As the frequency moves further into infrared, JWST is better than Hubble. The other things that affect how clear an image is are “point spread function” - how much light gets scattered. And how steady the telescope can be held on one spot. Both of these capabilities are better for JWST than Hubble.
- causality0 4y ago
  Again the evasive language. I'm not talking about the technical specs, I'm talking this dang picture. This one. Are the finest details in this picture finer than the finest details in the Hubble ultra-deep field?
  - asmithmd1 4y ago
    Are “the finest details” of an X-ray of your wrist finer than a screen grab from a camera phone video of your wrist?
  - RandomBK 4y ago
    This picture is not the actual image data from JWST, but rather an interpretation of infrared data. If you're only asking about the details in this picture, my understanding is that JWST is better though not by orders of magnitude. However the actual answer is that the two telescopes are not easily comparable in this fashion.
doctoboggan 4y ago
Hubble is able to take higher resolution (smaller angular resolution) pictures in it's optimum wavelengths. Even though JWST has a larger light bucket, the photons its capturing are longer wavelength so the end result is a lower resolution. You asked in another comment "Are the finest details in this picture finer than the finest details in the Hubble ultra-deep field?". In a sense, yes since the finest details in this photo are of a wavelength that Hubble isn't sensitive too, so they are visible here but do not show up in an equivalent Hubble shot.

dav_Oz 4y ago

This is an extremely mind-boggling image, there is a lot going on here. So first, one has to keep in mind that this is a composite with images from different wavelengths (exposure time 12.5h), so there could be some artefacts from processing. Now to the fun part. It is a deep field image i.e. a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground The focus is on the galaxy cluster (SMACS 0723) approx. 4.7 billion light years away (incidentally, earth's very age) The stars causing clear diffraction spikes[0] are way in the foreground ... but the "reddish fuzzy twirled objects" are lensed through the galaxy cluster itself revealing what is way way back (the "redder the farer") --- that's where the NIRCam of the JWST now gives us some really juicy details of galaxies 13 (!) billions light years away, only a couple 100.000 years after the Big Bang. Compare this to the faint Hubble image [1]! For anyone irritated by the distortions: gravitational lensing can cause a lot of weird patterns e.g. a "Einstein Cross"[2] [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction_spike https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction_spike [1]https://i.redd.it/9uyhwijeo0b91.gif https://i.redd.it/9uyhwijeo0b91.gif [2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_Cross https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_Cross

kumarvvr 4y ago

This image makes me feel a lot of emotions. I don't know if its the same with others. Just wow. The technical achievement is out of this world. Kudos to the whole team. But the image is just.. Each of those points of light is a galaxy, we are looking at trillions and trillions of galaxies, across the entirety of the visible sky (this image is from an area equivalent to a grain of rice held at an arms length). It is terrifying to even fathom if we are alone or not. Also, the Hubble Deep Field image took weeks. This took a mere 12.5 hours of exposure.

digitalsankhara 4y ago
You are not alone [1]. My emotional response to this image made my spine tingle and was almost tearful. Just trying to appreciate what I'm looking at will take me some time, appreciating all of the hard work and raw science that went into this less so. As an 11 year old, watching the moon landing, I lived and breathed all things NASA and space related. Now, as I near retirement, I feel just as privileged to view this image in the same way. [1] I wonder if the work of the JWT will impact Drake's equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
- antognini 4y ago
  It absolutely will. One of the big advances in the past two decades was the discovery of exoplanets, and at this point we've discovered enough of them that we can get reasonable constraints on their frequency (along with sketchier constraints on Earth-like planets). That alone removed one of the major uncertainties in the Drake equation. JWST will be able to make far better measurements of exoplanet atmospheres than any other telescope, so this should start to constrain how many Earth-like planets have atmospheres with biological signatures. These constraints will remove the next big uncertainty in the Drake equation.
  - digitalsankhara 4y ago
    Absolutely. The resolution of the spectral plots in yesterday's images was amazing.

michaelsbradley 4y ago

So beautiful! So many questions to be asked and natural mysteries to be probed by man made in the image and likeness of God. May such research give glory to Him who made the Pleiades and Orion (Amos 5:8), for His greater glory and the salvation of souls.

throwawaylinux 4y ago

What can scientists learn from this image?

throwawaycuriou 4y ago

Inspired tonight by this photo, I made this little tribute piece on my synthesizer: Webb Awakens https://drive.google.com/file/d/14mdhZ8yPdKarB8GHbWXToY9v_03v9NUU/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/14mdhZ8yPdKarB8GHbWXToY9v_03...

sidcool 4y ago

With all disagreements I see in this community, space has never been one of them. This is a beautiful image. Kudos NASA.

blinding-streak 4y ago
This is true, except for dark matter and dark energy debates :)
pawsforthought 4y ago
It’s somehow more grounding than every other human concern, if only for the fact that we have no ability to affect it even one iota (beyond our solar system). The greatest light show in all existence.

dotancohen 4y ago

Most of the curving stretched, I'm assuming gravitational-distorted, galaxies in that photograph seem to have a similar focal point for their curve. Surely that is not a coincidence. Is the body in the center of the photograph gravitationally distorting the light from the further objects all the way out to the edge of the photograph?

mbank 4y ago

This ain't new it's just the background image of beloved pc game "master of orion II" :)

myaccount80 4y ago

With this resolution, I’m wondering if we could see some artificial structures made by Type 3 civilizations, or some side effects of them. Or maybe we will feel even more lonely.

tgtweak 4y ago
Maybe if we zoom in closely on a shiney object we will be able to see into the past...
Angelore 4y ago
What are the odds that such an image (Dyson sphere for example) would actually be released? It's not like we have a raw feed from the Webb. On the other hand, suppressing it doesn't make much sense either, since the age of such an object would only indicate that something was, rather than is.

tgtweak 4y ago

The story behind the original capture by the Hubble is really incredible. This is kind of cool but I don't think JWT will have the same "damn this changes our entire perspective about the universe" potential.

dougmwne 4y ago
That depends on what kind of exoplanet atmospheres we find out there: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/nasa-s-webb-will-seek-atmospheres-around-potentially-habitable-exoplanets https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/nasa-s-webb-will-s...

seydor 4y ago

is the glare real? (and why is it hexagonal). Are the smudges due to gravitational lensing or motion?

ginko 4y ago
>is the glare real? (and why is it hexagonal). The hexagonal star pattern is an artifact of the struts holding the secondary mirror. More details here: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/james-webb-spikes/ https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/james-webb-spikes/

captaincrowbar 4y ago

"From our home on the Earth, we look out into the distances and strive to imagine the sort of world into which we are born. Today we have reached far out into space. Our immediate neighborhood we know rather intimately. But with increasing distance our knowledge fades, and fades rapidly, until at the last dim horizon we search among ghostly errors of observations for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial. The search will continue. The urge is older than history. It is not satisfied and it will not be suppressed." -- Edwin Hubble

28304283409234 4y ago

All that vastness, those infinite planets. And we just keep f*.. up the only known one with life.

andy_ppp 4y ago

It seems almost impossible to believe there appears to be very little out there in terms of alien signals. Demis Hassabis’ argument that we would see lots of signals by now if other life had reached human intelligence levels seems persuasive to me. Almost seems more terrifying if we eventually explore the universe to find nothing else there…

dandare 4y ago

What is this "star" effect on som of the prominent stars? Why is it only on some of the light sources? What causes it in a lense in general and why is it not correct for in JWST? Thanks!

fbanon 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction_spike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction_spike

fbanon 4y ago

It's a bit smudgy. Maybe they should try to clean the lens?

Naracion 4y ago

"Webb’s image covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground" I had absolutely no idea that these images we see of the universe / galaxy were such a small sliver of the vast possibility. That is incredible. Does anybody know: 1. What is the field of vision on this image, and 2. what is the widest field of vision image that we have captured of the universe?

ozgung 4y ago
I found the image surprisingly empty considering this is a 2D projection of an enormous 3D volume. The size of a grain of sand from arms length but size of hundreds of galaxies at the far end.

yosito 4y ago

I am wondering if the galaxies that look extruded are actually stretched like that from some crazy force or black hole or something, or if the light is distorted.

wgx 4y ago
It's gravitational lensing from the cluster of galaxies around the center of the image. Source: https://twitter.com/ProfBrianCox/status/1546722072499462147 https://twitter.com/ProfBrianCox/status/1546722072499462147

belter 4y ago

Don't know why, but feeling a bit emotional about the image. Besides this first one, whole set will be released in 3 hours: https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/countdown.html https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/countdown.html

vishnugupta 4y ago

Press conference of unveiling of images is 20 minutes away https://youtu.be/nmMRMIE3MGw https://youtu.be/nmMRMIE3MGw

deleted 4y ago

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alionaguseva 4y ago

How about 1.4 Gigapixel image of the galaxy? The new photos are stunning. Let's Enhance's AI made them super high res for you to enjoy the clearest view of the Universe. Download: 80MP/140MB https://drive.google.com/file/d/150VhXVEfYXmr70LrrZxQ50pU0u5H9VXV/view?usp=sharing 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__QDUmrIvLnlxoSOksu3mgpeXj3mjQ/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/14x__QDUmrIvLnlxoSOksu3mgpeX...