Deepest infrared image of universe

https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/nasa-s-webb-delivers-deepest-infrared-image-of-universe-yet/

by l- • 4 years ago

1136 347 4 years ago

cwkoss3• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Gravitational lensing

cwkoss3• 4 years ago

So, are the smudges' light coming from behind the objects in the center?

dredmorbius10• 4 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32063057

dvh• 4 years ago

The smudges are proof that Einstein was correct

ehsankia2• 4 years 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-ta...

aosaigh• 4 years ago

Is the lensing the result of a single large galaxy in the middle that is “closer” or many galaxies?

rbanffy• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

According to https://www.newscientist.com/article/2328132-james-webb-spac..., "This first image is a region of space called SMACS 0723, which contains what astronomers call a gravitational lens. In areas like this, a massive object relatively close to Earth behaves like a magnifying glass, distorting space and stretching the light of anything behind it." and "The gravitational lens in SMACS 0723 is particularly strong because the nearby object distorting space-time is not one galaxy, but a large cluster of galaxies."

yrgulation4• 4 years ago

From the link in ops post:

“The combined mass of this galaxy cluster acts as a gravitational lens, magnifying much more distant galaxies behind it.”

hengistbury• 4 years ago

According to the Webb Space Telescope post [1]: "This slice of the vast universe is approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground."

According to the Hubble Site post [2]: "...the Hubble Deep Field image covers a speck of the sky only about the width of a dime 75 feet away"

Edit: So that same page for the Webb image states 2.4 arcmin across, compared to ~3.4 arcmin for the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image [3]

[1] https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/038/01G...

[2] https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/1996/news-1996...

[3] http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/98-the-universe/ga...

mgdlbp• 4 years ago

Yea, feels like the swirly bokeh of a photo taken using a lens with mechanical vignetting or sagittal astigmatism (colloquially Petzval, but field curvature is both sagittal and tangential).

(like https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:16042014_Bokeh.jpg, https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/52126)

nabla92• 4 years 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/Hersch...

ceejayoz4• 4 years ago

Here’s a Hubble comparison: https://twitter.com/erinbiba/status/1546624746598563840

nabla92• 4 years 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).

b0sk• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Webb's view of the universe? And how do we know :-/

yrgulation4• 4 years 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• 4 years 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

ehsankia2• 4 years 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?)

interestica3• 4 years 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.

davesque• 4 years 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.

interestica3• 4 years 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).

dotnet002• 4 years ago

Reminds me of Arianespace's launch streams compared to pretty much everyone else's. All of new space tries to make their streams interesting and modern without shifting the focus from the thing that matters (the rocket), while Arianespace shows a bunch of people talking with a tiny view of the rocket people actually care about seeing. Lately even ULA has pretty cool footage to show afterwards.

Feels like this is just the usual case of the 'old guard' being completely out of touch.

pelagicAustral• 4 years ago

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

spullara2• 4 years ago

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

ceejayoz4• 4 years ago

Explanation: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/james-webb-spikes/

penneyd• 4 years ago

Hubble had diffractions spikes too, four of them from the struts holding the secondary mirror.

_moof2• 4 years ago

They aren't from the mirrors; they're from the struts.

_xerces_• 4 years ago

They're from the mirrors, just one is from the struts.

kristianp• 4 years ago

They are distracting. Will they be able to dim the "lens-flares" computationally?

colechristensen8• 4 years ago

Lens flare is the wrong term but yes they do correct for them.

spullara2• 4 years 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 [–]

gizajob2• 4 years 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?

anigbrowl2• 4 years 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.

Osmium2• 4 years ago

In fairness, some of the criticism isn't armchair: some of us work in science, may know what good science communication can look like, and can then be fairly critical of what is a wonderful opportunity for effective communication with a large audience being mishandled. These opportunities do not come every day, so it's important to make the most of them.

I imagine the NASA conference tomorrow may give more clarity, e.g. perhaps today's announcement was a last-minute press op that wasn't sufficiently planned? Maybe the full NASA briefing will be better.

With that said, I think it's fair to keep this discussion separate so as not to overshadow the very real and tremendous accomplishment we're witnessing today. Obviously the manner of the announcement is insignificant compared to the result itself, and I hope everyone involved is very rightly proud.

guerrilla• 4 years ago

The same people who flagged me for predicting the public speaking would be as terrible as it turned out to be and that they needed to find better people to handle this. This was just embarrassing, especially considering what's been done in the past.

moralestapia• 4 years ago

A few days ago I saw a tweet (because Twitter shows me "Popular" crap all the time) from some "science influencer" that said something like "The new pictures from the Webb telescope are bringing scientists to tears!".

I get that's how they earn their bread but from my point of view it comes off as awkward and dishonest, it does the complete opposite of getting me excited about the release.

lovehashbrowns3• 4 years ago

Sounds a lot more fun to just talk about the picture and the science.

_moof2• 4 years ago

Who is flagging this extremely valid criticism of this photo release circus?

People who are more interested in the photo and the technology that produced it than public communications, would be my guess.

interestica3• 4 years ago

I just found how bad it was to be utterly strange and unexpected:

No updates via their channels on the delay. Their linked live stream had no mention of delay and just displayed general unrelated content (about the ISS). In situ comments were also turned off so there was no way to corroborate with others that there was a delay or if one was even in the right space for the release. Even when eventually ready to go live, they made no update -- those that got to see from the beginning were those that happened to be keeping the feed open for the 90mins.

In the press conference, it was a screen of a screen displayed within a screen. When the 3 highlighted members were featured, their names were thus too small to be seen on the feed.

snowwrestler• 4 years ago

From the HN guidelines:

Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

This was not the first awkward science press event and it won’t be the last. It’s annoying but that is not noteworthy; life is full of annoyances. A new deep image from a new space telescope is what is really noteworthy.

Also from a practical perspective, complaining here won’t reach the people you actually want to influence. NASA staff are publicly available; if you want to complain, look up their email addresses and write to them directly. You might even get a reply!

pohl• 4 years ago

Criticism can be both valid and entirely irrelevant at the same time. People are just protecting the S/N ratio.

Temporal_Trout2• 4 years ago

Higher Resolution Images available here: https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/038/01G...

Full-Res 4537x4630 PNG (28.51 MB): https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01G7JJADTH90FR98AKKJFKSS0B.png

Hubble's capture of the same area: https://bigthink.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/smacs0723-73... and a gif comparison vs the JWST: https://i.redd.it/9uyhwijeo0b91.gif posted by /u/WhatEvery1sThinking on Reddit.

Kye• 4 years 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

darzu3• 4 years ago

Same comparison zoomed into my favorite part without motion: https://twitter.com/sprigland/status/1546633629236748294

skrause• 4 years 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• 4 years 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?

perihelions8• 4 years ago

Here's a variant of that GIF that separates out the blue, blue+green, and blue+green+red channels, to (hopefully) highlight which differences are due to the longer wavelengths (and which look more like exposure time difference). Webb's color mapping roughly aligns with the RGB channels, so I think this is meaningful [0].

https://i.ibb.co/D8dW6v5/jwst.webp

[0] https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/038/01G...

("...the assigned colors are: Red: F444W Orange: F356W Green: F200W + F277W Blue: F090W + F150W")

Steps to reproduce:

    convert 9uyhwijeo0b91.gif[1] -resize 4537x4630 aligned-hst.png
    cp STScI-01G7JJADTH90FR98AKKJFKSS0B.png jwst-rgb.png
    convert jwst-rgb.png -channel R -fx "u*0" jwst-gb.png
    convert jwst-gb.png -channel G -fx "u*0" jwst-b.png
    convert -delay 150 -loop 0 jwst-{b,gb,rgb}.png aligned-hst.png my.gif
    ffmpeg -i my.gif -loop 0 my.webp

pcdoodle• 4 years ago

Aren't the red ones moving really fast away from us and the white ones more "stationary" from our point in the universe?

lamontcg7• 4 years ago

What is the exposure difference between the Hubble and JWST images?

Temporal_Trout2• 4 years ago

I couldn't find an exact exposure time for the Hubble image, the press release by the ESA has this quote though: "This deep field, taken by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), is a composite made from images at different wavelengths, totaling 12.5 hours – achieving depths at infrared wavelengths beyond the Hubble Space Telescope’s deepest fields, which took weeks." [1] There is also another comment further down this thread stating Hubble was 140 hours. [2]

[1] https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2022/07/Webb_s_fir... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32063214

jlaporte• 4 years ago

This deep field, taken by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), is a composite made from images at different wavelengths, totaling 12.5 hours – achieving depths at infrared wavelengths beyond the Hubble Space Telescope’s deepest fields, which took weeks.

12.5 hours total exposure for the JWST image, "weeks" for the HST image

chakalakasp• 4 years ago

I think it was around 20 days for the Hubble and around 12 hours for the JWT

qbasic_forever• 4 years ago

Wow I love how things that were dots or haze with Hubble are brilliant spirals and galaxies in the JWST image. Absolutely amazing!

criddell• 4 years ago

I always wonder if we had a sensitive enough instrument, would it get more difficult to pick out individual galaxies? Or, are there enough galaxies that an image taken by a very sensitive telescope would have no black areas?

cbm-vic-20• 4 years ago

Incredible. If each of those galaxies has on average a few hundred billion stars (our is estimated to have between 100b-400b), and each of those little dots is an entire galaxy, well, that's a lot of stars in this image.

MrDunham• 4 years ago

People use the term mind-blowing loosely but it really fits here. That’s an utterly astounding, incomprehensible number of stars.

And this image is “roughly the size of a grain of sand held at arms length” of the night sky.

justinator• 4 years ago

Lots of planets, too. Some, with life.

zamadatix• 4 years ago

I created a webp comparison: https://ibb.co/9ZjpLnV

martijnvds• 4 years ago

James Webp?

wolfd• 4 years ago

Thanks for finding those images! I threw together a page that lets you compare them via a slider. You should be able to zoom in on mobile!

https://blog.wolfd.me/hubble-jwst/

The .gif comparison was a bit... upsetting since the color palettes are so limited and the resolution is so low, so it really didn't put JWST _or_ Hubble in a good light.

caseyf7• 4 years ago

This is incredibly useful. Thank you!

fsckboy• 4 years ago

would it make sense to balance the two images in terms of brightness? the hubble one just seems dimmer.

There is some extra "pinpoint" clarity in the Webb image, but it doesn't show (for instance) a bunch of new stuff, I was surprised at that.

HPsquared• 4 years ago

It looks like restoration of an old painting where the aged, yellowed varnish is stripped away to reveal the (much brighter and more detailed) original painting below.

randyrand• 4 years ago

amazing progress

noisy_boy5• 4 years ago

Highly recommend the full-res image - brings out a great deal of character from a lot of the galaxies that is just not visible in the zoomed-out image.

noisy_boy5• 4 years ago

Some that I found quite interesting:

https://ibb.co/zPvxrFT

https://ibb.co/NYsp9Jw

https://ibb.co/wJDQ7XM

https://ibb.co/yf8RTM2

https://ibb.co/d72g9Jx

https://ibb.co/BBPvFZf

https://ibb.co/567Z9RC

https://ibb.co/Hpm43Xr

https://ibb.co/JBhmCxL

https://ibb.co/PMYqnXb

drclau• 4 years ago

Can you elaborate why you found those interesting?

sph2• 4 years ago

Some of those shapes are just incredible, like the 4th that looks like a glimpse of what will happen shortly after the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy will collide in a few billion years.

There's a great animation of it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_co...

igorv• 4 years ago

I've created a zoom & pan version of the full-resolution image - https://example.sirvtest.com/nasa/universe.html

alionaguseva2• 4 years ago

How about 1.4 Gigapixel image of the galaxy? The new photos by @NASAWebb are stunning. Let's Enhance's AI made them super high res for you to enjoy the clearest view of the Universe.

Download: 80MP/140MB https://drive.google.com/file/d/150VhXVEfYXmr70LrrZxQ50pU0u5...

1.4GP/2.5GB (note: not every image viewer can handle a file this big) https://drive.google.com/file/d/14x__QDUmrIvLnlxoSOksu3mgpeX...

dredmorbius10• 4 years 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

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...

pkaye5• 4 years 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• 4 years 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?

mtlmtlmtlmtl• 4 years ago

I was honestly slightly underwhelmed by the improvement in detail until I saw your comment about the exposure times. Now my mind is utterly blown, thank you.

knowaveragejoe• 4 years ago

The level of detail completely blows away other deep field images.

dredmorbius10• 4 years ago

I need to double-check the colour-to-wavelength mapping, but I suspect many of the redder objects in the image would be entirely invisible to the Hubble simply by being beyond its sensor range in the IR spectrum.

MattRix• 4 years ago

I don’t think most of the comparison images so far have really demonstrated the difference in quality and resolution, but this gif does: https://twitter.com/jason4short/status/1546633395643432961?s...

JohnBooty• 4 years ago

I was also underwhelmed until I zoomed alllllll the way in. Try it.

sharkweek2• 4 years 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.

gravitate3• 4 years 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?!

sharkweek2• 4 years 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.

Starlevel0013• 4 years ago

Imagine approaching a black hole and being spaghettified a light year across where you have to endure a thousand years of physical torture before being destroyed at the event horizon?!

This would only happen for very small blackholes, and even then from your point of view time would act normally.

y0ssar1an• 4 years ago

According to this video, the spaghettification doesn't happen until the last few seconds/minutes, when you're close to the singularity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rTv9wvvat8

jiggawatts• 4 years ago

Assuming that a reasonable fraction of the planets have life, and then some non-vanishingly small number have intelligent life, this photo contains millions or even billions of planets with intelligence.

The Star Trek vision of the future is a handful of contacted races, all very distinct.

This.. this is nearly a continuum of possibility. Political systems? This image has them all, and every intermediate, outlier, and axis explored. Warfaring? There are more than likely a million battles being fought in this image, right "now". A trillion-trillion soldiers and weapons systems of every kind, and every kind in between. Flying tanks. Hover artillery. Underwater helicopters. Nanobots. Microbots. In-between bots. Every kind of bot.

The numbers are just... unimaginable. You could chart every aspect of these civilizations with smooth graphs, much like the Stellar classification chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_classification

yrgulation4• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

ceejayoz4• 4 years 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

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• 4 years ago

genuinely curious if the advancements of AI image generation and editing tools can assist with using this data to produce some approaching realism.

dotnet002• 4 years ago

To add to what the others said, I think it was mentioned previously that one of the things being released tomorrow is spectra of an exoplanet's atmosphere.

wruza2• 4 years ago

The size difference between our galaxy and our planet is ~14 orders of magnitude. For a planet to have the same dimensions as in the picture, it must be proportionally closer. That means if these galaxies from the image are 1e10..1e11 light years away (whether you guess to ignore the expansion or not), a planet must be 1e-3..1e-4 light years away, which barely covers the distance to Pluto.

Of course the above doesn’t account for lensing and who knows what else, but you get the idea. (If my math is correct)

pkaye5• 4 years ago

You need to mask out the bright star with a coronagraph and then the planet needs to be big/bright enough. Even then you will just see a dot as this ESO telescope image shows. However using spectroscopy they can deduce the composition of the planet atmosphere.

https://www.eso.org/public/images/potw1846a/

doctoboggan2• 4 years ago

It seems to be a common misconception that JWST will give us the best angular resolution of any existing telescope. However that is not the case. JWST was designed for lower wavelengths, and due to physics reasons you get a lower angular resolution for a given reflector diameter, as compared to higher wavelengths.

So even though the JWST is a larger scope, Hubble's visible wavelength photos are higher resolution than JWST's longer wavelength photos.

nerbert• 4 years ago

So many lensing effects!!

2bitencryption• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

There's a Star Trek episode addresses this sort of 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.

drieddust5• 4 years 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.

el_nahual• 4 years ago

Did a civilization rise and fall somewhere?

Yes. The same civilization! (wait for it)

or is it one of those things where relativity is so unintuitive that asking a question like this is nonsensical?

The latter. One of the most unintuive aspects of relativity is the relativity of simultaneity. Basically, the order in which events happen in different places in the universe is relative. Imagine event A happening in galaxy A, event B happening in galaxy B, and event C happening in galaxy C.

From the POV of one observer, events might happen in order ABC, while for other they may happen in order BCA.

This doesn't mean that the observers simply see the events in different order because of their distance to them--it means that even when taking distance into account, one event happened before the other.

So yes, a civilization rose while you wrote that comment. It also fell... from the POV of someone else.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity

cwkoss3• 4 years ago

Does time move faster the deeper you are in a gravity well?

If a civilization was trying to compete with another in another galaxy, could they coalesce as much matter as they could into a single star, increasing gravity, and relativistically experience more time in their star system than the other civilization?

jungturk2• 4 years ago

Yes, it does (from the point of view of observers outside the gravity well), and yes they could. They could also accelerate themselves to relativistic speeds to accomplish the same feat.

lovehashbrowns3• 4 years ago

I think they’d just need to travel slower through space to experience more time relative to the other civilization. Then that civilization could take more that time to develop a civilization-ending laser or whatever.

Then for gravity, the less gravity that civilization experiences the slower time moves for them relative to their competitor.

So I think the goal would be to send star matter to the other civilization so their time slows down relatively speaking.

I’m no expert, though. Happy to take corrections.

SAI_Peregrinus• 4 years ago

Yes. You can actually measure this just by the mass difference of a mountain here on Earth, with a sufficiently accurate pair of clocks.

http://www.leapsecond.com/great2016a/index.htm

arthens• 4 years ago

Would that not achieve the opposite effect?

If interstaller thought us anything, the closer you are to a black hole the slower time gets. When they got close to the black hole they only spent a few hours there but lost years compared to our frame of reference.

jungturk2• 4 years ago

Yes, the two settings (aka "reference frames" in special and general relativity) can experience time at different rates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation

mabbo3• 4 years ago

Time will pass for them very very closely to the same rate it does for us.

But here's something fun: the space between us and them is stretching, so in a billion years when the light arrives at our position, the time between photons will be longer than when they left (so things will appear slower) and the photons will be at a longer wavelength making it more red.

colechristensen8• 4 years ago

There are situations where time passes differently like with high speeds and in gravity wells, but except for unusual circumstances, time will pass mostly at the same rate for life on any two planets across the universe. Because on relativistic scales they’ll be in very nearly exactly the same inertial frame.

Like maybe a few nanoseconds over ten minutes difference. One could probably come up with a standard deviation statistic, but whatever it would be would be way below a perceptual difference. (We can measure the difference in the flow of time with a clock on a table compared to another on the floor, but of course that’s way less than could be felt)

mannerheim• 4 years ago

Depends on their velocity relative to Earth. The unintuitive bit of relativity is that you observe the other as experiencing time more slowly - this is the origin of the twin paradox (i.e., shouldn't each twin observe the other as having aged less?) whose resolution comes from the fact that the second twin is in a non-inertial reference frame once he changes directions to return to Earth.

perihelions8• 4 years ago

Reality is much crazier than that. Some of the distant galaxies are causally disconnected from us: they're receding faster than the speed of light (by one out of the several definitions), and will (probably) continue to do so, so no information can travel between us. No causal interaction is possible. It's as if they were practically no longer a part of this universe -- they can't affect anything here, and nothing here can affect them.

(I'm not certain on this point, but I think some of the high-redshift galaxies we can see in deep field images are now causally disconnected. We're receiving some of their old light, but we can't send anything back anymore -- they've faded out into infinite redshift).

edit: Here's an article about this idea by Ethan Siegel, and its HN discussion thread (thanks 'petilon for helping me remember the author):

https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/the-disappearing-unive... ("The Disappearing Universe")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7896776 (64 comments)

joelcollinsdc• 4 years ago

Can you provide a link with this info? I’m only a casual follower of this stuff but it seems hard for me to believe

Pokepokalypse• 4 years ago

But if we can image it, then there IS an effect.

The photons emitted by that galaxy effect us, here in ours because we can see them.

It's the ones we can't see that are disconnected.

de6u99er3• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

de6u99er3• 4 years 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.

zw1234562• 4 years 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?

de6u99er3• 4 years ago

Definitely. But it won't matter.

layer82• 4 years ago

It wouldn’t, because then there wouldn’t be anyone who it would suck for.

hypertele-Xii• 4 years ago

You don't know that. Sure there's lots of worlds there and even more space between them, but size and scale isn't everything. Meaning may be unevenly distributed. Universe could be fractal. Those could be minor variations of the same world, rather than many different ones. They could have laws of physics distinct from ours for all we know.

calebm• 4 years ago

This makes me imagine a little part of the Mandelbrot set saying it is irrelevant because it's such a small part of the whole. But in truth, the Mandelbrot set is not the Mandelbrot set without every part of it (the math would be off). We are the universe. As Alan Watts said: "an apple tree apples, and the universe peoples".

Gatsky• 4 years ago

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

ISL• 4 years ago

What an incredible achievement for our civilization.

sylens• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

colechristensen8• 4 years 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.

darzu3• 4 years ago

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

ncmncm6• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.”

darzu3• 4 years ago

You don't think this is radically increased sharpness? Look at the orange ones on the right: https://twitter.com/sprigland/status/1546633787030704129

blueblisters• 4 years ago

In The Future, when we loft hundreds of flat mirrors maintained in an array hundreds of km across, all this will seem pretty pedestrian.

Or we use the Sun as a gravitational lens.

dang• 4 years ago

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

kristopolous4• 4 years 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.

colechristensen8• 4 years 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.

pkaye5• 4 years ago

How did the measure the curvature of the universe?

jaaron• 4 years 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/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.

perihelions8• 4 years ago

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

alfiedotwtf2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

alfiedotwtf2• 4 years ago

Ah, OK thanks... Now I see what gravity lensing means!

unzadunza2• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Unfortunately, times don’t add like that under relativity

mason55• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Is this because space is expanding? 68 km per second per megaparsec, see https://phys.org/news/2015-02-fast-universe.html, so the observable universe is more light years big than its age.

dkarp• 4 years ago

Prepare to have your mind blown: 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

mabbo3• 4 years ago

Get ready for this answer because it is wild: There universe grew way, way faster than the speed of light.

At this point of the very early universe, the metric that defines distance within space suddenly and very rapidly changed in scale, leaving the early universe at least 10^78 times its previous volume (and possibly much more). This is equivalent to a linear increase of at least 10^26 times in every spatial dimension—equivalent to an object 1 nanometre (10−9 m, about half the width of a molecule of DNA) in length, expanding to one approximately 10.6 light-years (100 trillion kilometres) long in a tiny fraction of a second. This change is known as inflation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe

Objects within space can't move faster than light. But space itself can stretch fast enough that they objects within the universe are having the distance between them grow faster than the speed of light.

canjobear• 4 years ago

Inflation was way before the time seen in this image.

AgentME• 4 years ago

The universe can expand faster than the speed of light because of the expansion of space. The rule "nothing can go faster than light" is more situational than it's usually presented; I believe the true rule only means that objects that meet each other can't have a speed difference more than lightspeed, but for objects that are far apart, it's possible for them to see the distance between each other grow as if they were moving apart faster than light because of the expansion of space between them.

SkeuomorphicBee• 4 years ago

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.

That is the first mistake in your train of thought, the universe doesn't expand "at the speed of light", it is not a ball expanding outwards with an outer shell expanding at a measurable speed.

Instead it expands everywhere all at once, all distances are being stretched. And this streatching doesn't have a "speed" (m/s), there is nothing traveling, so it is not bound by the speed of light. Instead it has a rate of expansion (m/m/s) as in how much each meter will grow in a second.

Sorry, I'm not an expert so I don't know how to explain properly.

unzadunza2• 4 years ago

I like this.

My 'bad' mental model is: In the beginning there was an infinite amount of space and somewhere within that space the Big Bang happened. The universe is all the matter and energy produced by the Big Bang and that universe is expanding at a maximum speed of C through the infinite amount of space.

But you are saying, I think, that before the Big Bang there was no space. The Big Bang produced all the matter, energy, and space itself. And space is expanding, NOT just the matter and energy expanding through the infinite pre-existing space that I imagined.

I still have a very hard time imagining 'no space' before the Big Bang and the concept of space being something besides 'nothing'. Because if space is expanding it must be something more than nothing.

Keyframe3• 4 years ago

Not to say there is no such a boundary, it just might not be what intuition would tell us like a baloon, a sphere or similar. Geometry of universe might be a torus, but also not really. Shit gets weird when you start reading research, and it takes a lot of effort to even start reading with comprehension there.

hoten2• 4 years ago

In other words, the speed of light is irrelevant. It (or relativity) doesn't dictate at all a limit on the relative speeds of two objects. This much is obvious if you consider two objects moving in oppositive directions at 51% the speed of light. Certainly valid, even though combined their relative speed from each other is >c

You can extrapolate the same to the expansion of the universe, I think, but I may be simplifying too much.

csomar• 4 years ago

13 billion years old
26 billion light years away

You are comparing distance to time.

kadoban2• 4 years ago

Yes, because the speed of light relates them. Distance and time are interchangable if you know the speed as well, and especially if you use units where the conversion constant is 1 (ly/y)

lamontcg7• 4 years ago

The big bang didn't expand from a single point explosion.

The big bang happened literally everywhere in the universe.

The size of the universe both now and at essentially the time of the big bang (or some infinitesimal time after whatever happened at the exact singularity) was infinite.

The energy-density though was much higher, and the universe has stretched so that distant points in the universe were much closer together back then.

The fact that we see galaxies traveling away from us very quickly at high redshift is due to the expansion of space. Those galaxies are going to be stationary on average when measured locally.

It is like you are standing next to someone but you both see each other moving away from you because something is inserting more and more rulers between you.

The insertion of the rulers in that picture is also how the energy density drops over time because there's more and more space between all the stuff, so the density drops, and the temperature drops.

But the big bang happened here 13.7 billion years ago or so, and the big bang also happened 13 billion light years away out there, roughly 700 million years before that light left (ish).

Calling it a "bang" is really the wrong word to use. Its really the big adiabatic cooling where the size of the container just keeps on getting bigger.

And that is probably not the whole picture since there's also inflation in the early Universe to talk about when the Higgs mechanism(s) broke and released a pile of energy and blew the universe up very quickly.

AnimalMuppet3• 4 years ago

And that is probably not the whole picture since there's also inflation in the early Universe to talk about when the Higgs mechanism(s) broke and released a pile of energy and blew the universe up very quickly.

1. Is inflation anything more than a "just so" story? That is, is there any evidence besides the overall smoothness of the universe? (Without such evidence, it seems to me that inflation is "the universe is smoother than we expect, so it must have happened this way.)

2. Can you ELI20 why the Higgs broke (I presume you mean symmetry breaking), and why that would release a bunch of energy?

3. The Higgs breaking should release energy in space-time, but inflation was an expansion of space-time. Why should an energy release drive that?

ncmncm6• 4 years ago

The Milky Way galaxy really is that old. There are at least millions of stars (red dwarfs) in the Milky Way, probably most with planets, fully that old. Some of those could easily be covered with life nearly that old. And, probably way more black holes that old, many (co-)orbiting those red dwarfs.

That is not to say our galaxy had its present form, then; a bunch of galaxies merged to make ... well, what we are in. (Ownership would be wrong to claim.)

It is really just our own sun that is new. Ish.

That many billions of years is time for a very great deal of evolution. But, also of exposure to such existential risks as nearby supernovas and magnetar starquakes that could sterilize a whole planet down to the mantle. A galaxy is a dangerous place even without alien invasions. So, lots of Pompeiis covering the full spectrum of stages. But given time, life could arise again, wholly new, after.

perihelions8• 4 years 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/2022/038/01G...

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... ("NIRCam Filters")

aimor• 4 years ago

Thank you! I was going to ask before I saw this.

SomeHacker44• 4 years 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.

prpl4• 4 years 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.

axg11• 4 years 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.

pkaye5• 4 years 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.

supernova87a3• 4 years 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_• 4 years 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.

supernova87a3• 4 years 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/Wf1vHio

pkaye5• 4 years ago

I'm sure someone could check the MAST archives (https://archive.stsci.edu/) of all historical Hubble pictures to see if they match up.

alberth• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Gravitational lensing. It's also visible in the Hubble images of the same region if you look elsewhere in this thread.

kadoban2• 4 years 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.

mwattsun3• 4 years 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-crit...

[2] https://www.space.com/36975-telescope-array-site-tour-photo-...

prpl4• 4 years 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

mwattsun3• 4 years 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

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.

codezero• 4 years ago

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

hn_throwaway_99• 4 years 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.

zaphod12• 4 years ago

Thank you for this. It really is heartening to see amazing science done for its sake. Something not horrible for a change.

RajT88• 4 years ago

I am giddy about what we will see once they start pointing it at nearby exoplanets.

adastra22• 4 years 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.

tomgp• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Reminds me of this - https://cdn.quotesgram.com/img/53/30/1253009639-7ab83ab4c9b8...

causality02• 4 years 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?

asmithmd12• 4 years 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.

causality02• 4 years 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?

doctoboggan2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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

[1]https://i.redd.it/9uyhwijeo0b91.gif

[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_Cross

kumarvvr• 4 years 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.

digitalsankhara2• 4 years 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

antognini2• 4 years 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.

neuronic• 4 years ago

Me too, and it really saddens me that I am mostly met with shoulder shrugs and rolling eyes by friends and family around, most of them with graduate university degrees too... I was really excited about the images releasing today.

Flankk• 4 years ago

It's inconceivable, looking at it gives me a feeling of derealization. God doesn't begin to explain it. We're some primates on a speck of dust why all of this then? To me it looks like a hall of mirrors. It's like looking at a procedurally generated image in a simulated universe.

michaelsbradley• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

What can scientists learn from this image?

throwawaycuriou• 4 years ago

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

sidcool• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

This is true, except for dark matter and dark energy debates :)

pawsforthought• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

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

myaccount80• 4 years 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.

tgtweak2• 4 years ago

Maybe if we zoom in closely on a shiney object we will be able to see into the past...

Angelore• 4 years 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.

tgtweak2• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

That depends on what kind of exoplanet atmospheres we find out there:

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/nasa-s-webb-will-s...

seydor• 4 years ago

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

ginko• 4 years 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/

captaincrowbar• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

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

andy_ppp• 4 years 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• 4 years 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!

fbanon2• 4 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction_spike

fbanon2• 4 years ago

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

Naracion• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

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

belter• 4 years 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

vishnugupta• 4 years ago

Press conference of unveiling of images is 20 minutes away

https://youtu.be/nmMRMIE3MGw

alionaguseva2• 4 years 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/150VhXVEfYXmr70LrrZxQ50pU0u5...

1.4GP/2.5GB (note: not every image viewer can handle a file this big) https://drive.google.com/file/d/14x__QDUmrIvLnlxoSOksu3mgpeX...

Deepest infrared image of universe

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