James Webb Space Telescope reveals Fomalhaut's disk in detail

https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/the-james-webb-space-telescope-reveals-fomalhauts-disk-in-unprecedented-detail/

by gmays • 3 years ago

393 173 3 years ago

skyandtelescope.org

ftxbro• 3 years ago

alternate headline: webb looks at star known to have debris disks and suspected planets, hoping to confirm at least one planet but isn't able to confirm any of them

jp42• 3 years ago

If JWST can do these amazing discoveries and detailed images, I wonder what kind of discoveries we make when starship can launch way bigger telescope than JWST. Future is Awesome!

Cthulhu_• 3 years ago

Bigger is one option, but more of them is another; combining the data from multiple telescopes at, say, 10km apart effectively turns them into a telescope with a 10km diameter (see e.g. the event horizon telescope that made the first image of a black hole: https://eventhorizontelescope.org/ )

rqtwteye2• 3 years ago

You get the resolution but not the light capturing capability of a big telescope. The event horizon telescope had to do a lot of machine learning trickery to get an image. Also, as far I understand, it's much more difficult to do this at the wavelength of visible light.

digging3• 3 years ago

Manufacturing the JWST was already extremely challenging. Not saying we can't do bigger, but payload size isn't the only limiting factor.

sebzim45002• 3 years ago

Manufacturing the JWST would be a lot easier if it weren't for the mass/volume constraints.

jakear3• 3 years ago

Anyone know what the black blob in the center is? It's conspicuously left out of the labeled diagram, and doesn't seem mentioned in the article either. I imagine it's the central sun in question, but isn't it odd to never mention it?

btilly2• 3 years ago

That's the coronagraph that blocks out the star itself so that everything else is visible.

https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2023/03/24/how-webbs-coronagraph...

hn83058234• 3 years ago

There has been a lot of confusion about this but it is actually overexposed pixels deleted in software. From the lead author of the paper:

https://twitter.com/AndrasGaspar/status/1655680076103716878

cubefox16• 3 years ago

Yeah. The ability of journalists to ignore the most obvious questions is baffling.

ceejayoz• 3 years ago

Or a magazine named “Sky and Telescope” may understand, being fairly niche, that its readers don’t need the obvious ones answered.

dudeinjapan• 3 years ago

Redacted by the CIA, because it contains evidence of extraterrestrial life.

samstave• 3 years ago

What does the F2300C and F2550W mean? Focal length?

dekhn5• 3 years ago

They are "mask" which only allow some wavelengths so you can see different structure.

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

xioxox• 3 years ago

They are the filters used in the observation. Telescopes use filters to select a range of light wavelength/frequency to be observed. See http://svo2.cab.inta-csic.es/svo/theory/fps3/index.php?id=JW... to see their properties.

dekhn5• 3 years ago

that's just stunning

jansan• 3 years ago

The most stunning and accessible comparison between Hubble and James Webb for me is still the pillars of creation images. A few weeks ago I was in the planetarium at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville where they faded from the Hubble image into the James Webb image. That was truly a sight to behold. In general the presentation there was one of the best I have ever seen.

Edit: I think this video is exactly what they showed. Of course, in this case the bigger your monitor the better. https://youtu.be/f8q8ZIXf_Rw?t=67

danparsonson5• 3 years ago

That is wonderful - all those stars! Oh for a warp-capable spaceship and a lifetime to explore.

tambourine_man2• 3 years ago

As a layman I get the feeling that JWST is showing us more detailed things we'd already seen than brand new ones. I remember being moved by the Hubble deep field, where a long exposure revealed that what looked like an empty patch of the sky was anything but.

Are we reaching the point of diminishing returns of what a reasonably sized (for our current rockets) space telescope can see?

soulofmischief• 3 years ago

JWST is an infrared scope of a magnitude never before employed. Astronomy is more about collecting data than anything else, pretty images are a welcome side-effect. JWST will be extremely beneficial for deep-space exploration. It's worth reading about!

digging3• 3 years ago

Are we reaching the point of diminishing returns of what a reasonably sized (for our current rockets) space telescope can see?

No, not as far as I know (also a layperson). It's just that we've already seen the incredible leap of "there's nothing here" -> "there's things here". The JWST is still a massive leap in capabilities, but you aren't going to be as impressed at seeing intricate structures inside a galaxy that once appeared smooth. The JWST is truly a new era of exploring the early universe, but it might not have the same "wow" factor.

potamic• 3 years ago

They did discover several galaxies beyond redshift 11 that Hubble cannot see. I'm not in the field, but venturing a guess here that they might want to prioritise getting images of known objects first, because there must be so much active research that can immediately benefit from the new detail. Over time I hope they will dedicate time for some wild hunches like Hubble did and open up something yet unknown.

hn83058234• 3 years ago

The Hubble deep fields take many days/weeks/months of exposure time. The deep fields released from JWST so far have been just hours long...

There are a lot of different proposals being rapidly shot in these early year(s) of the telescope. Later on there will certainly be longer exposures.

tambourine_man2• 3 years ago

I'm eager to see what JWST can do with more than 48h of exposure. It should be amazing. I'm wondering why they're choosing to shot other stuff before.

nologic01• 3 years ago

Discovering brand new things at a constant rate is probably not a realistic expectation. The 20th century has been an extraordinary journey for astronomy that cannot possibly continue indefinitely (same with other parts of fundamental science). We went from barely a sense what our galaxy is about, to discovering an extraordinary number of exotic astronomical objects by progressively expanding the window into radio, x-ray, gamma rays, gr waves etc.

But I don't think its true that future astronomers / space telescopes are condemned to boring hires pictures of known stuff. The excitement is not in the visual impression but in what it might tell us about the universe. In the end what matters is whether we understand what is happening (e.g., in this instance how planetary systems like our very own are forming). So while the visual impression might not alter much, the quantitative detail may be fixing the physics or even prompting completely new theories. Remember sometimes even the stuff you don't see can bring about a revolution (dark matter, dark energy).

retrac• 3 years ago

Are we reaching the point of diminishing returns of what a reasonably sized (for our current rockets) space telescope can see?

In terms of sensitivity, yes. Collecting more light needs more light-collecting material, which ultimately means more mirror, or detector, surface area. Little more gain to be had there. We're not going to see much more that's really, really faint.

But we're just getting started with resolution. Apertures can be synthesized in software. Theoretically, a handful of space telescopes, orbiting the Sun, linked together, could have an angular resolution equivalent to that of a physical telescope with a mirror the same diameter of the orbit. Not the light sensitivity (since the "mirror" is mostly empty space), but it would have the ability to distinguish between two points like such a giant telescope would.

This has been done with radio astronomy already; things have just recently gotten fast enough for aperture synthesis at infrared wavelengths; optical is probably not too far behind.

adgjlsfhk13• 3 years ago

I think optical is pretty far behind. EHT was already dealing with 100s of TB of data per telescope. Going to visual turns that into ~10s of PB. I think the more likely advance is some way of doing space based radio wave interferometry.

BurningFrog• 3 years ago

JWT doesn't have much more detail than Hubble, but it observes infrared frequencies, which is a whole new view of the universe.

thangalin2• 3 years ago

Years ago, for my Impacts Project, a scientific illustrator created a similar image (page 7):

https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf#page=7

The middle of the disc has our star having burned away everything close by, leaving an empty area behind, which the JWST cannot show because of the blindingly bright star. Each of the rings in the illustration represents paths for our rocky planets (yet to have fully formed).

isoprophlex2• 3 years ago

Incredible, my kids will love this..! Thanks!

thangalin2• 3 years ago

Thanks! The illustrators did an incredible job and the physical book itself is in lay flat format.

https://impacts.to/

Here's the book's bibliography, in case you're wondering about the science:

https://impacts.to/bibliography.pdf

joshmarinacci• 3 years ago

What is this project? It looks amazing. Will it be a printed book?

NoMoreNicksLeft3• 3 years ago

I feel cheated... I glance at the image, see that bulge in the ring and was immediately excited that they had captured the visual image of an exoplanet (even if it was going to be a large brown dwarf).

Nope, just something behind the ring.

Synaesthesia3• 3 years ago

A visual of an exoplanet is still beyond the possibility of anything but a REALLY big telescope (100m)+

hotshot1001• 3 years ago

Actually we've imaged many exoplanets, but typically ones that are much larger than Jupiter.

Here's a famous system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HR_8799

Vox_Leone• 3 years ago

I glance at the image, see that bulge in the ring and was immediately excited that they had captured the visual image of an exoplanet (even if it was going to be a large brown dwarf).

I was under the same impression. Upon a second look it became clear that blob is roughly 8 AU in diameter [judging by the overall scale]

NoMoreNicksLeft3• 3 years ago

I'm not sure that an 8AU diameter would be that absurd, if we're talking about a proto-planetary nebula, would it?

But yeh, if I weren't a nitwit, the scale's completely wrong (and it should be hoovering up the ring in short order besides).

krisoft2• 3 years ago

The outer ring is about 240 astronomical units in diameter.

That is huge. Just reference for those who don't feel "astronomical units": One astronomical unit (AU) is (roughly) the Earth-Sun distance.

Distances to compare with: Pluto is ~39 AU away from the sun. Voyager 1, the furthest probe of humanity right now, is ~160 AU away from the sun.

So in other words: that is mind-bogglingly large.

(If you want to read more about astronomical units: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_unit )

mwcremer2• 3 years ago

Comparing diameter to radius is a little misleading, the ring is actually closer than Voyager, at 120 AU. On the same scale, Pluto is 78 AU and Voyager is 320 AU.

krisoft2• 3 years ago

Comparing diameter to radius is a little misleading

Nah. It is comparing a distance with a distance.

Besides I assume more people reading my comment are familiar with the concepts of radius/diameter than the meaning of astronomical units. But now, thanks for your clarification, even the geometrically challenged will have the correct mental model. You never know.

On the same scale, Pluto is 78 AU and Voyager is 320 AU.

Have to disagree. You take your pocket tape measure, carefully hook the end of the tape on the Sun and slowly walk to Pluto. You read what it says. That is a distance.

Then you walk to the disk, hook one end of the tape on one side (carefully, since it is made of dust) and walk to the other side. That is a distance.

Where do I hook my tape measure to measure 78 AU for Pluto? Orbits are not real. You cannot kick them, you cannot lick them, you cannot hook a tape measure on them.

“See where that planet is? Now imagine how far it will be in 124[1] years in a sun fixed coordinate system!” does not quite have the same impact on me as “See that blob? It is huuuge!”

Doubling the number with Voyager makes even less sense. You cannot even say that you are measuring the antipodal points of its orbit, since it is not orbiting the Sun. So the “diameter” of what are you even talking about there?

1: half of Pluto’s orbital period.

labster• 3 years ago

No one cares about a factor of two in astronomy.

ck2• 3 years ago

What's interesting is if you express 1 AU as "8 light minutes" it doesn't sound so far away, but of course it is.

(240 AU is 32 light hours)

nopassrecover• 3 years ago

It's interesting that there's potentially a bit of a pattern forming with the stars we've observed, with an outer belt being around 10x the diameter of an inner belt.

Though out of fashion, the various power laws of Bragg, Richardson, Armellini building on the Titius–Bode rule come to mind, namely that there may be physical reasons to see orbital patterns emerge consistent with some sort of power law.

Below data includes candidate planets/disks still being verified.

Our Sun: - Mass 1 M - Inner Planets: 0.39 AU to 1.52 AU - Inner Disk (Asteroid Belt): 2.1-3.2 AU - Gas Giants: 5.2 AU to 30.06 AU - Outer Disk (Kuiper Belt): 30-55 AU

Formalhaut: - Mass: 1.92 M - Hot Disks: 0.21 AU to 1.08 AU - Inner Disk: Around 8-12 AU - Outer Disk: Previously around 133-158 AU but now suggesting around 120 AU? (Surrounded by a larger halo)

Vega - Mass: 2.135 M - Planet: 0.05 AU - Inner Disk: Around 8 AU - Outer Disk: Around 80-120 AU (Surrounded by a larger dust halo)

Epsilon Eridani: - Mass: 0.82 M - Inner Disk: Around 3 AU - Planet: 3.48 AU - Potential Additional Disk: Around 8-20 AU (and may revise inner disk & planet) - Planet: 40 AU - Outer Disk: Around 35-75 AU

Proxima Centauri - Mass: 0.1221 M - Planets: 0.03 - 0.05 AU - Hot Disk: 0.4 AU - Inner Disk: 1-4 AU - Planet: 1.5 AU - Outer Disk: 30 AU

HR 8799 - Mass: 1.43 M - Inner Disk: Less than 16 AU - Planets: 16.25 AU, 26.67 AU, 41.39 AU, 71.6 AU - Outer Disk: 135-360 AU

Beta Pictoris - Mass: 1.75 M - Planet: 2.7 AU - Inner Disk: 6.4 AU - Planet: 10 AU + Potential Planetary Belts: 14/16, 28/30, 52, 82 AU - Outer Disk: 130 AU (Surrounded by a larger disk/halo)

55 Cancri - Mass: 0.905 M - Planets: 0.01-0.7 AU - Speculated Planets: 0.9-3.8 AU - Planet: 5.9 AU - Disk: Around 40 AU (Would be interesting if a second disk around 4 AU)

Tau Ceti - Mass: 0.783 M - Planets: 0.1-1.334 AU - Planet: 3-20 AU - Disk: 35-50 AU (Would be interesting if a second disk around 3-5 AU)

Maursault• 3 years ago

One astronomical unit (AU) is (roughly) the Earth-Sun distance.

I guess that's just one of those cosmic coincidences.

pfdietz15• 3 years ago

Just think what space telescopes will be like if the Starship reduces cost/kg to orbit to 1/10th or less of Falcon 9's already low cost. They'd get very big, and it would likely make sense to assemble and maintain them in space by workers in space suits. It might even make sense to have telescopes in high Earth orbit with a maintenance station located nearby.

dekhn5• 3 years ago

the cost of launching a scope is not the bottleneck.

pfdietz15• 3 years ago

High cost of launch prevents economical repair (especially in high orbits), which requires extreme reliability. It also creates incentive for extreme weight reduction. Both these drive up the cost of a satellite. At low launch cost, there's no reason a space telescope should be much more expensive than a terrestrial telescope of the same size.

sebzim45002• 3 years ago

No, but the mass and volume constraints are. See how much effort went into making JWST fold up and how hard they had to try to get the mirrors to be light enough.

nordsieck4• 3 years ago

the cost of launching a scope is not the bottleneck.

Starship isn't just about price, but also fairing volume. And fairing volume is one of the major factors that drives telescope design.

It's even possible that SpaceX would do a limited run hammerhead fairing for the right price.

itishappy2• 3 years ago

Webb isn't in an earth orbit though, it's at a Lagrange point that humans have never visited, and it's there because that's where it can get the best images. I don't think Starship can even get there at all without orbital refueling.

pfdietz15• 3 years ago

Sure, and it's also there because there was no plan to ever repair or service it. And that was because as it was being planned, launch was very expensive, so no satellite beyond LEO (where it could not be, for heating reasons) could reasonably be serviced.

cubefox16• 3 years ago

I can't find it now, but about a year ago there was an article by some professors with an extensive analysis what Starship could do for space science.

Their point was that Starship has a big potential to significantly reduce cost by enabling the development of devices that are less optimized for size and weight. For example, the extremely expensive JWST could have been built with a much cheaper, non-foldable mirror, since the Starship fairing has a quite large diameter.

But they also argued that there is an unfortunate tendency in science to overoptimize everything, which leads to exploding cost. So it is well possible that scientists won't use Starship to reduce the cost of their spacecrafts, but to optimize them for maximum performance like they did before, e.g. by designing complex foldable mirrors which barely fit into the Starship fairing.

So I guess if they do that, Starship would enable an even stronger cost explosion than in the past, not a cost reduction. More available mass and size means more opportunity to spend money on complex engineering. The launch costs themselves are not a significant factor here.

vl2• 3 years ago

Interesting consideration:

Starship is monolithic right now, ie it’s unclear how it can unload payload of its own size. There are no bay doors a-la shuttle.

I guess they will have to do tilt-away nose section or something.

pfdietz15• 3 years ago

Or, it means teams and organizations that can't control cost don't make the discoveries, and are weeded out.

echelon• 3 years ago

Forget everything else, we need to build THIS :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQFqDKRAROI

A telescope array that can use our sun's gravitational lens would enable us to resolve the surfaces of extrasolar planets. We could resolve surface features as small as 10 km across at a distance of 100 light years.

JPL is actively investigating this. It's incredibly promising.

cubefox16• 3 years ago

Yeah, though I have some doubts as to how certain it is that it would really produce results that impressive. Maybe this is quite speculative. There could be tiny inaccuracies which reduce the image quality substantially.

tonyg• 3 years ago

Beautiful. Thank you for that link.

macspoofing4• 3 years ago

Just think what space telescopes will be like if the Starship reduces cost/kg to orbit to 1/10th or less of Falcon 9's already low cost.

Falcon 9 is around $60 million/launch (though when contracted by NASA or the military, launches tend to be 2x-4x the price). This is pretty much inline with what you get from Arianespace, and Roscosmos. There is no path to reduce price by another order of magnitude. We've pretty much hit the limit on what we can do with chemical rockets.

pfdietz15• 3 years ago

Falcon 9's price is a bit below its competitors. But remember, cost != price. There is not much reason for SpaceX to reduce the price further, if demand is sufficiently inelastic.

There is room to reduce cost much further. Discarding the second stage is a large cost. The propellants used by F9 cost $200K/launch, according to Musk. With full reusability costs should fall at least another order of magnitude.

wolfram74• 3 years ago

Or, since there's no downward pressure on price, it's equally valid to say we've hit the limit of what we can do with capitalism in the current ecosystem.

moffkalast2• 3 years ago

LUVOIR's planned to launch on Starship or something of its size.

cubefox16• 3 years ago

It is not even planned to be built, just a concept.

once_inc• 3 years ago

It would make sense to have telescopes in orbit at Lagrange points around various gas giants and in far corners of space. The maximum definition of the Event Horizon telescope is based on the physical distance of each of the observatories on Earth. Moving observatories to all parts of our system will allow us to have vastly higher resolution.

Orbital dockyards and asteroid mining would be in reach if Starship delivers on its (admittedly pretty steep) promises.

isoprophlex2• 3 years ago

Interesting comment below the linked article:

Lots of asymmetries involved. The star is off-center toward the lower right, same direction as the partial arc. The major ring could be elliptical, rather than circular. It also varies in brightness around the circumference.

I'm a complete layman, but could this explain the high deviation from circular orbits of our own outer planets? IIRC this was something of an unexplained issue?

timdellinger• 3 years ago

A side-by-side before-and-after with the "previously best" image to compare against the new image would be great to see.

Synaesthesia3• 3 years ago

Here's on which is a composite of the ALMA (millimetre wave telescope) superimposed with Hubble (in blue)

https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2017/05/22/best-images-yet-o...

Here's just that ALMA pic

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ALMA_Explores_Fomalh...

jl6• 3 years ago

If I may take advantage of the presence of knowledgable people in this thread…

The JWST is located at the L2 point. Does that mean L2 is now “taken”, or could it make sense to host multiple telescopes and spacecraft at or near that point?

mnw21cam• 3 years ago

There's already multiple telescopes there, including the Gaia telescope. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_objects_at_Lagrange_po...

itishappy2• 3 years ago

In short, it orbits the L2 point. There's plenty of room for more!

Here's a 20s YouTube video that should clear things right up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cUe4oMk69E

Here's an article with additional info:

https://webb.nasa.gov/content/about/orbit.htm

7373737373• 3 years ago

As I understand it, it's more of a region around that point in space that spacecraft try to stay close to/within

causi2• 3 years ago

It reveals an inner belt, akin to the solar system's asteroid belt but dustier and more extended; an intermediate belt; and a previously imaged outer belt that's analogous to our Kuiper Belt.

How could something analogous to our Kuiper belt possibly reflect/emit enough light to be visible as a cloudy ring? There is no way it isn't orders of magnitude more massive than the Kuiper belt.

cl42• 3 years ago

I was going to ask the same thing -- maybe someone more astronomically inclined has an answer to this...

If one were to take a phot of our solar system, would our asteroid belt really be dense enough to show up in any wavelengths?

causi2• 3 years ago

The most likely explanation to me is that the author is just wrong in describing it that way and it's a much more massive debris disc slash protoplanetary disc.

bbojan• 3 years ago

Maybe because it's still gas and dust, whereas if the same mass coalesces into large objects it's much less reflective?

danparsonson5• 3 years ago

At a guess - very long exposure times. Even if it's only sending one photon per second in our direction, if we stare at it long enough then eventually we'll have an image.

eimrine2• 3 years ago

Are there any previous images of the same object from a superexpencive telescops of previous generations to compare James Webb's advance from other telescops?

coldpie• 3 years ago

Wikipedia has a number: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fomalhaut

Hubble: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NASA%27s_Hubble_Reveals_R...

ALMA: https://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1216a/

casenmgreen• 3 years ago

Can't view. Stuck in the Cloudflare verification loop.

quakeguy• 3 years ago

It’s a brave new web.

platz• 3 years ago

Maybe there's a Ruined Portal there

anonymousiam• 3 years ago

I don't understand the use of "ruined" in the NYT headline. I guess they don't understand that this is a very young star, and it's likely that our own sun had similar rings before they coalesced into planets.

whatshisface• 3 years ago

The intermediate belt is also where exoplanet hunters once thought they had seen a world they named Fomalhaut b. But in 2020, Dr. Gaspar and his colleagues proposed that what other scientists had once thought was an intact exoplanet was actually an expanding cloud of debris created by an epic collision.

A problem with this idea was that this part of space looked vacant, so it seemed unlikely that two objects had managed to crash into each other. The team’s discovery of the intermediate debris belt has now proffered a solution.

“We now know there’s stuff there,” Dr. Christiansen of the NASA archive said. “OK, so it’s a collision — we can finally put that to bed.”

Cataclysmic melees are not just transpiring close to the star. What looks like a vast maelstrom of dust within the outer belt may be the ghost of another gargantuan impact.

“That’s just cool,” Dr. Christensen said. “What is it? It’s very tantalizing.”

ph0rque2• 3 years ago

"... She eats and wipes her mouth and says, ‘I’ve done nothing wrong.’"

frob• 3 years ago

Who is the adulterous woman here?

Edit: the above quote is from NASB Proverbs 30:20.

This is the way of an adulterous woman: She eats and wipes her mouth, And says, “I have done no wrong.”

ph0rque2• 3 years ago

Not adulterous per se, but planetivorous perhaps. Just seems wrong to eat your planets...

10g1k• 3 years ago

I've read this book, and it doesn't end well for humans.

James Webb Space Telescope reveals Fomalhaut's disk in detail

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