The Webb telescope just offered a revelatory view of humanity’s distant past

https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/07/the-webb-telescope-just-offered-a-revelatory-view-of-humanitys-distant-past/

by Bender • 3 years ago

118 75 3 years ago

arstechnica.com

yread• 3 years ago

Zoomable image:

https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2023/128/01H...

amazing detail on those fibers/roots-like clouds

perihelions• 3 years ago

Of course a large image of a cloud that is igniting itself would be hosted by a "cloud flare" CDN.

swader9993• 3 years ago

Imagine if each panel in the image was hyperlinked to smaller zoomable files that seamlessly floated in and out as you zoom around. All of it mirrored and replicated in backups and hoovered up in NSA profiles for perpetuity. Almost as breathtaking...

jcul• 3 years ago

Thanks,it is an amazing image. I was thinking I'd love to order a print of it, looks like it should be possible to get one made from the high res image.

coldcode• 3 years ago

There are links to the print-sized image at the bottom.

https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01H44ARCYBXAE95TXH1KGCFZ35.tif https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01H44AVB69N1P8RAEJ12NW2RB2.png

At 300 dpi, these would be around 40x40 inches. I do see a lot of artifacts in the large images, but it probably looks decent on a print.

muterad_murilax• 3 years ago

Does the cloud complex where our Sun was born still exist?

adaml_6232• 3 years ago

Good question. I'm not an astrophysicist but..

Solar system is 4.5 billion years old. The sun has been around the galaxy 18 times since forming.

And as you can see from that image the gases that make up star forming regions are literally blown around by the nearby stars.

So combining fragility of a nebula with time plus 18 loops and I think it's totally gone.

Plus I saw a YouTube video a few days ago that theorised that earth sized rocky planets would only form around suns in star forming regions with nearby massive bright stars that would be actively tearing the nebula apart at the same time that the planets were forming.

Santosh83• 3 years ago

Likely the stars born from it (including ours) accreted most of the gas & dust and the rest dissipated through stellar radiation pressure. Its been more than 5 billion years.

adaml_6232• 3 years ago

Really interesting talk published a week ago about how massive stars interact with processes like star formation in galaxies.

https://youtu.be/fDUOEdcjqSo

AlbertoGP2• 3 years ago

The connection to “humanity’s distant past” is quite tenous:

But it is very real, showcasing the process of stars being born a mere 390 light years from Earth. This is the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth.
Given the nursery's proximity and Webb's unparalleled scientific instruments, we have never had this kind of crystal-clear view of these processes before. [...]
This is a revelatory view of our own distant past. Our own star and Solar System formed a little more than 4.5 billion years ago, when a molecular cloud collapsed into what became our Sun.

Still worth taking a look, best through the zoomable image linked to by yread in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36721362

sundarurfriend2• 3 years ago

Also:

Farther away from this star and its cavity, there are orange-ish clouds. According to the Webb telescope's astronomers, these are organic compounds known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. These carbon-rich compounds are possibly an essential part of the genesis of life, although scientists are unsure of this.

AlbertoGP2• 3 years ago

Yes, you are right. I should have quoted that part too.

denton-scratch2• 3 years ago

It's not a "view of processes", it's a snapshot.

I'm afraid it reads like a fan-review of a rock gig. The information content is low.

It is a fantastic photo, though.

sgt• 3 years ago

I wonder what happens in a star nursery when a star first ignites for the first time. Is it an immediate flash that dims, or does it take centuries to become visible?

swader9993• 3 years ago

It depends how much gas you put on it. Guaranteed you burn your knuckle hair off every time.

nwallin• 3 years ago

It takes tens to hundreds of thousands of years.

As the gas cloud collapses into a protostar, it undergoes adiabatic heating. The intense heat causes radiation pressure which prevents the protostar from collapsing further. (it will also do deuterium/lithium burning, but to a first approximation the protostar is heated by the gravitational collapse) Only as the excess heat is radiated away can the star shrink into a main sequence star that burns hydrogen into helium. During the protostar phase, it's enveloped in a gas cloud. As the heat from the star evaporates and blows away its gas cloud, it becomes a pre main sequence star, and it's not easily distinguishable from a main sequence star. It is a very hot object that will shine brightly. If you were to just look at it in a telescope, it will appear the same as any other star. Only after it's allowed to radiate energy away for a few tens to hundreds of thousands of years will it shrink enough to begin burning hydrogen into helium and will its collapse halt. There is no flash or anything, and it does not begin suddenly; a minor amount of fusion will happen, and then it will eventually accelerate into a steady state.

pfdietz3• 3 years ago

And the smaller the star, the longer it takes to settle onto the main sequence. This is an argument against life around small (class M) stars: they will have roasted any planet that would otherwise have ended up in the habitable zone.

quantum_state• 3 years ago

It says “ Our own star and Solar System formed a little more than 4.5 billion years ago, when a molecular cloud collapsed into what became our Sun. As the Sun formed, it did so with a large disk of leftover material about it, spinning. Over time, the material in this disk coalesced into the planets, large gas giants like Jupiter and smaller rocky worlds like our own Earth.” How would one reconcile the fact that the heavy elements in the rocks that formed the earth could only be produced as result of fusion and supernova process? Was the material captured by the hydrogen cloud that later formed the solar system?

guerrilla• 3 years ago

Yeah, other stars.

wwilim• 3 years ago

"Humanity's" distant past seems like quite a bit of a stretch here. I guess the word is there for clickbait factor

junon3• 3 years ago

Not really, it's believed the hydrocarbon clouds are a precursor to possible life formation, and that it's possible that's exactly how our solar system was formed in such a way to produce life on Earth, which is inarguably the precursor for humans. So to say this is looking at something that happened similarly in our (human) distant past is at least accurate based on our current understanding. A bit sensational, perhaps, but I wouldn't call it clickbait.

BlueTemplar• 3 years ago

Then "life's past" would have been better ?

Calavar• 3 years ago

I feel that it is disingenuous in the same way that it would be disingenuous to write an article about neolithic agricultural practices and title it "How Google Came to Be." Are these things causally related? Yes, they are. But that doesn't make them topically related.

swayvil2• 3 years ago

Has our society always run on clickbait or has the internet just made the fact visible?

Clickbait = temptation, if you want to get religious about it. That's what demons always do in the stories. They tempt. They assault the saint with powerful clickbait.

nologic01• 3 years ago

The immediate precursor are argubly sensationalist newspaper frontpages. Carefully chosen so as to sell the entire paper.

But only tabloids would fairly consistently cross the line that distinguishes a "vivid account" of something from something borderline false.

You could say that the internet, more specifically the need for "virality" engineered a race to the bottom that turned publishers into tabloid sites.

anigbrowl• 3 years ago

No. It has always been present, but there used to be a greater respect for accuracy and knowledge, and much writing offered to inform the reader than activate their emotions ('eg just offered a revelatory view' implying that this is somehow time-sensitive news).

If you want a clear but depressing example, visit a digital archive and contrast issues of scientific American from the beginning and end of the 1990s. At the beginning of the decade it offered a serious presentation of science news/insights for a general audience (more accessible than an academic paper, but still requiring work to read, similar to a textbook). By the end of the decade standards had fallen considerably as their audience shrank and they went in the direction of greater 'accessibility' with more gee-whiz articles, columnists etc, and even introducing a larger body text font to reduce the content while maintaining the same page count.

It seems to me that the main drivers were popular access to the internet and a general drop in attention spans, along with the proliferation of cable TV channels during the same period, and the rise of '24 hour news' outlets like CNN and Fox News, both of which are cancerous. Television in general is trash, with an endless focus on effects and visual gimmicks designed to hypnotize rather than inform or educate.

nerdjon2• 3 years ago

Yeah I was a bit annoyed at that one, generally I find ArsTechnica's clickbait not that bad but this one bothered me.

Like I get what they were going for, but unless we know that the matter that we are made of is there in this image than it is a scientific inaccuracy that I wish we did not actively spread.

Now I know that we are looking into the past here, but unless my understanding of space is wrong the only way this would actually be true is if our sun (and other related material) moved faster than the speed of light.

At least that is how I read the headline, that the image shown is (or would be) the material that makes us up now.

ninjanomnom• 3 years ago

Using gravitational lensing I imagine it's possible to get an image of the earth from the distant past, though difficult to get everything lined up right. In a more trivial sense, you could take a mirror to the moon then take a picture of it from earth and you would have an image of earth from the mysterious past of a few seconds ago.

Melkor765• 3 years ago

The way I read this was "The Webb telescope just offered a view of starbirth that sheds light on earths distant past," it's accurate in that sense (our star was born and we're not sure how exactly) and agree could have been worded better.

tracerbulletx• 3 years ago

I think it is annoying because it's so arrogant. Ok fine technically you can say anything is humanities past in the sense that it's in the past, but it's presumptuous to act like we have ownership of something so wildly broad. I think it would still be presumptuous to connect it to us even if it was about the history of our own sun or to pre homo-sapien geology, this is just even more so.

mensetmanusman2• 3 years ago

Humanity is the amazing process of stardust into life.

Without heavy elements from collapsing stars we can't exist, so in a real sense the birth of these stars is a very early step in humanity's existence.

jstummbillig• 3 years ago

It's very romantic. The part that is a little meh is where it's equally true for every other process.

gtirloni• 3 years ago

It mainly talks in general terms about a beautiful image.

There's nothing about humanity's distant past or even the universe's past at all.

This is a filler article, at most.

bregma• 3 years ago

    We are stardust, we are golden
    We are billion year old carbon
    And we got to get ourselves back to the garden

    Well, then can I roam beside you?
    I have come to lose the smog,
    And I feel myself a cog in somethin' turning
    And maybe it's the time of year
    Yes and maybe it's the time of man
    And I don't know who I am
    But life is for learning

embedded_hiker• 3 years ago

Thinking of those lyrics, and realizing Apollo 11 was just a few weeks before Woodstock, makes the "maybe it's the time of man" have a bit more punch.

jacquesm• 3 years ago

79 and still alive... what a text.

Aardwolf• 3 years ago

I think "view of our distant past" would have perhaps expressed the idea the best in a less clickbaity way

davedx• 3 years ago

Agree. I love space and space photography but this title is very clickbaity. Tiring

junon3• 3 years ago

Really glad Webb has been a success. I remember everyone being very tense around the launch given the degrees of failure possible. Truly a milestone for science.

ourmandave• 3 years ago

Euclid launched on Jul 01 and is on it's way to L2 now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid_(spacecraft)

sundarurfriend2• 3 years ago

For anyone knowledgeable about the technical process behind it: how long is the exposure period for an image capture, for it to get these contiguous regions of "color"/wavelength? Is there any postprocessing to smoothen it out? Are the lens flare entirely from the original data from the telescope?

trilbyglens• 3 years ago

Afaik Webb is mainly an infrared telescope, which is why it has such a large heat screen and is so far from the earth. None of what you see from it is visible light really.

The diffraction spikes on point sources are real and are an artifact of the support structures and mirror configuration of the telescope. If you look at the telescope you'll see all the mirrors are hexagonal, which corresponds to the six spikes on every point source of light.

faichai• 3 years ago

Whoah! I was just thinking "aren't these things all colourised by a human and largely fake", I was especially thinking about the starbusts and you just blew my mind. Thank you!

Do you know if the colourisation essentially just a frequency shift into visible light or is there some human artistic license involved?

pfdietz3• 3 years ago

It's my understanding that the Sun's natal star cluster is thought to have been bigger than this one, with maybe 10,000 newborn stars.

I recommend finding these stars (they will have distinctive and similar compositions) and treating them as SETI targets, on the off chance life originated before the star cluster dispersed and then spread between the closely spaced systems (panspermia).

reilly30002• 3 years ago

Very thoughtful. It stands to reason that life has a way of clustering amidst repulsion, so it ought to have formed relatively local to us, given we exist.

teleforce• 3 years ago

If you find a pair of Adidas slides in a barren desert, nobody in their right mind will argue that it has a creator and intended purpose. However people to this very day are still arguing whether magnificent celestial objects in the vast and largely empty universe that follow specific physical laws with ultra precision order and timing with conscious beings as inhabitants (at least on earth) has any creator and intended purposes.

swader9993• 3 years ago

We like to think that infinity or at least something very old and very large could allow this to randomly get there eventually. But no, it's not that big and not that old and the math just doesn't have enough dice rolls to get us here to where we are right now.

Karunamon• 3 years ago

Probably not the best place for this kind of comment…

Also, like most analogies, this one leaks. Even if our species dies off, whatever discovers our remains has direct, tangible evidence to fall back on: the shoes were likely created by the creatures who have evidence of living on the same planet.

I find good evidence for some kind of creator (Aquinas' "five ways" make a compelling case based purely on reason), but at the end of the day this tells us nothing about "intended purposes". At that point we are relying on fallible human interpretation, which history shows is a path fraught with dragons.

nerdjon2• 3 years ago

I mean... even as an Atheist my self I would think it would be much easier to believe in a god to explain where things came from (but of course that asks where did god come from) than the near mystical start of the universe and asking how that started in the first place.

Like it completely boggles my mind to try to think about how everything started, even if some theories are true and the Big Bang was not the start at some point you would think something had to be a start to "stuff".

Also frankly... religion brings comfort to a lot of people and as long as someone is not using it to harm someone else (like deny rights) than I don't think we should downplay or attack someone for believing in something that makes the hard parts (like the inevitability of death) easier to deal with.

twobitshifter• 3 years ago

If those slides fit my foot and keep the desert sand from burning my feet, wouldn’t I understand their purpose and think they were made by someone? In fact all adidas slides have a creator, so I think I’m missing your point.

vogon_laureate• 3 years ago

Whenever the minor annoyances of life gets you down, take a moment to awe-bathe in images like these. It puts it all into perspective.

may_i_ai_plz• 3 years ago

Some part of me wonders if the truth of the universe exists in Photoshops cloud filter. I can create some of these images with a few clouds, twirls and layer blends. It’s all usually just very random.

I’m gonna lose my mind if one of these telescope pictures comes back with a lens flare.

We may not be in a simulation, but instead inside God’s photoshop.

noduerme2• 3 years ago

Does everything captured by JWST have the same 6-pointed lens flare proportional to its brightness? Why?

matt-attack• 3 years ago

NASA adds that with an Insta filter just to give the image some panache.

totetsu• 3 years ago

https://www.theverge.com/23220109/james-webb-space-telescope...

noduerme2• 3 years ago

Fantastic explanation! Thank you!

jcims3• 3 years ago

Here it is with the moon for scale.

https://imgur.com/a/rZORMXh

Here's a shot in visible light with the moon in view

https://earthsky.org/todays-image/may-lunar-eclipse-and-rho-...

Rho Ophiuchus is 'upside down' relative to the pic in TFA. The bright stars with diffraction spikes in the JWST image are the three topmost stars in the visible image that are white and obscured by dust.

I wish more astronomy photos included scale information. I like using outlines of the moon and of Saturn as appropriate units for the task at hand.

meteor333• 3 years ago

is this as viewed from the earth? or as the moon placed next to the stars?

jcims3• 3 years ago

As viewed from the earth. This is how big the nebula is in the night sky.

The second photo contextualizes it better as it’s a single photograph.

legohead• 3 years ago

So in this image we have stars smaller than the moon and a cloud of particles also much smaller than our own sun making multiple stars? I'm confused.

jcims3• 3 years ago

No think of it as what it would look like from your back yard if you could see them both at the same time.

The Webb telescope just offered a revelatory view of humanity’s distant past

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