James Webb Telescope

[pje16]

Our alien 'friends' would be extremely advanced by our standards

which reminded me of this classic advert
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLYNoejZcv0

[XFool]

Hallucigenia: thanks for the explanation.

Both: but the big star in the centre has 8 points, the two horizontal ones being weaker than the 6 others. And the one at the top right has 12 with the horizontal ones being amongst the brightest, as are with the umm, multi pointed one that's pretty much horizontal with the big star and about a quarter way into it from the left hand side...

Yes, I did note the horizontal lines - segmented rather than continuous like the others. Artefact of the optics in the instrument section? Interesting, all the lines in the Hubble image are similarly segmented. The plot thickens!

The one at the top right looks like a gear wheel, at 200% zoom.

As ever, the closer you look at things, the more complicated they become. Rather like UAPs?

[XFool]

It's both! Yes? No? Maybe...

Diffraction artifact on the March 12, 2022 Pattern JWST aligned test image

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/58624/diffraction-artifact-on-the-march-16-2022-jwst-aligned-test-image


Where do James Webb’s unique “spikes” come from?

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

When we started imaging the Universe with Hubble, every star had four "spikes" coming from it. Here's why Webb will have more.

It sounds as if it's largely down to the mirror segments and overall shape of the main mirror.

Note from the technical "selfie", the struts are not spaced at equal angles. From a diagram in that article, if true to life, it is the struts causing the segmented diffraction lines; as in the Hubble telescope, which has four evenly spaced struts holding the secondary mirror.

[ursaminortaur]

...I was recently wondering about something like this, with its large exposed mirror.

Is the telescope manufactured in a way that would facilitate a repair mission to repair damage, the sort of thing that was done with Hubble to correct errors in the optics.

Regards,

Why would we send a mission to repair it when we could just hold a big placard up at the Jubilee flypast saying "Dear UFO, please fix the hole in our telescope"?

GS

Be careful that could be viewed as a contract and for all we know under alien law all such contracts with aliens have to be settled in the form of anal probes.

[GoSeigen]

...I was recently wondering about something like this, with its large exposed mirror.

Is the telescope manufactured in a way that would facilitate a repair mission to repair damage, the sort of thing that was done with Hubble to correct errors in the optics.

Regards,

Why would we send a mission to repair it when we could just hold a big placard up at the Jubilee flypast saying "Dear UFO, please fix the hole in our telescope"?

GS

Be careful that could be viewed as a contract and for all we know under alien law all such contracts with aliens have to be settled in the form of anal probes.

If they stick the probe in the hole that's exactly what we need...

Just an observation, where ever humans go they leave an extraordinary amount of litter behind. With all these aliens flying around our cities and skies, why do we so seldom find alien crisp packets and beer bottles thrown out of their windows? Maybe it was an errant bottle top that hit the JW telescope?

GS

[ursaminortaur]

...I was recently wondering about something like this, with its large exposed mirror.

Is the telescope manufactured in a way that would facilitate a repair mission to repair damage, the sort of thing that was done with Hubble to correct errors in the optics.

Regards,

Why would we send a mission to repair it when we could just hold a big placard up at the Jubilee flypast saying "Dear UFO, please fix the hole in our telescope"?

GS

Be careful that could be viewed as a contract and for all we know under alien law all such contracts with aliens have to be settled in the form of anal probes.

If they stick the probe in the hole that's exactly what we need...

Just an observation, where ever humans go they leave an extraordinary amount of litter behind. With all these aliens flying around our cities and skies, why do we so seldom find alien crisp packets and beer bottles thrown out of their windows? Maybe it was an errant bottle top that hit the JW telescope?

GS

Maybe they are extremely conscientious about littering - but certainly, if they are here, they aren't like the aliens in "Roadside Picnic"

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

Roadside Picnic is a work of fiction based on the aftermath of an extraterrestrial event called the Visitation that simultaneously took place in half a dozen separate locations around Earth over a two-day period. Neither the Visitors themselves nor their means of arrival or departure were ever seen by the local populations who lived inside the relatively small areas, each a few square kilometers, of the six Visitation Zones. The zones exhibit strange and dangerous phenomena not understood by humans, and contain artifacts with inexplicable, seemingly supernatural properties. The title of the novel derives from an analogy proposed by the character Dr. Valentine Pilman, who compares the Visitation to a picnic:

A picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around... Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind... And of course, the usual mess—apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow.[3]

In this analogy, the nervous animals are the humans who venture forth after the Visitors have left, discovering items and anomalies that are ordinary to those who have discarded them, but incomprehensible or deadly to those who find them.

This explanation implies that the Visitors may not have paid any attention to, or even noticed, the human inhabitants of the planet during their visit, just as humans do not notice or pay attention to grasshoppers or ladybugs during a picnic. The artifacts and phenomena left behind by the Visitors in the Zones were garbage, discarded and forgotten, without any preconceived plan to advance or damage humanity. There is little chance that the Visitors will return again because for them it was a brief stop, for reasons unknown, on the way to their actual destination.

[Hallucigenia]

Both: but the big star in the centre has 8 points, the two horizontal ones being weaker than the 6 others. And the one at the top right has 12 with the horizontal ones being amongst the brightest, as are with the umm, multi pointed one that's pretty much horizontal with the big star and about a quarter way into it from the left hand side...

I wouldn't overthink an image from an instrument that is still not properly set up. I'd cut them some slack until they've got it running properly.

If you look at an image from a telescope that is running as it should (Hubble in this case, looking at NGC3603), you'll see these "starbursts" are completely normal and essentially ignored - if they were interested in the bright stars then they would just use a shorter exposure, the interest is usually in the gas, galaxies and other faint structures.

[XFool]

WHERE IS WEBB?

https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/whereIsWebb.html?linkId=147537628

Nearly there now!

"First images - July 12"

"We are counting down to July 12, 2022 when NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, a partnership with ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency, will release its first full-color images and spectroscopic data."

[kiloran]

Programme about JWT on BBC2 next Thu 14Jul22 at 20:00
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00197px

--kiloran

[moorfield]

WHERE IS WEBB?

https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/whereIsWebb.html?linkId=147537628

Nearly there now!

"First images - July 12"

"We are counting down to July 12, 2022 when NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, a partnership with ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency, will release its first full-color images and spectroscopic data."

Can't wait! As an ex-Physics/Astronomy graduate I know these results are going to be awesome.

[Hallucigenia]

And now we have the first "official" image - a field of galaxies, images of many are distorted by the gravity of the galaxy cluster in the middle :



Twitter random says this is the equivalent from Hubble :

More to be added at :
https://www.nasa.gov/webbfirstimages/

[mike]

Another Webb vs Hubble here, this time for the Carina Nebula. An unbelievable difference, absolutely breathtaking

Webb https://twitter.com/NASAWebb/status/1546877197583060993/photo/1

Hubble https://twitter.com/NASAWebb/status/1546877210010828800/photo/1

I can't see how to post the pictures directly, if anyone else can it would be wonderful to see them embedded here

[Itsallaguess]

Another Webb vs Hubble here, this time for the Carina Nebula. An unbelievable difference, absolutely breathtaking

Webb https://twitter.com/NASAWebb/status/1546877197583060993/photo/1

Hubble https://twitter.com/NASAWebb/status/1546877210010828800/photo/1

I can't see how to post the pictures directly, if anyone else can it would be wonderful to see them embedded here

Here you go -

Carina Nebula (Webb) -



Carina Nebula (Hubble) -



Cheers,

Itsallaguess

[mike]

Thanks Itsall - as I said in my earlier post, that photo vs Hubble is breathtaking.

I've now tracked down your instructions on how to post images https://www.lemonfool.co.uk/viewtopic.php?p=132911#p132911, so I'll have a play when I've got some time on the Testing board

[Itsallaguess]

John Christensen has created a brilliant web tool where he's aligning all the current incoming James Webb images with their Hubble equivalents, and which allows user-interaction to swipe and directly compare the visual results -

https://johnedchristensen.github.io/WebbCompare/

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

[ReformedCharacter]

Some wonderful images and commentary by Scott Manley:

My take on the images released by the JWST earlier this week, a whole new level of detail is now possible with this new instrument. Moreover, I wanted to answer some questions about what we're seeing in the images, and, why the stars have 8 points while Hubble images only show 4.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FWO1Pvbhq4

RC

[1nvest]

The James Webb telescope is of course limited to visible light, can't see back into the 'dusty/dark' post big bang cosmic dark ages. The likes of the Murchison Widefield Array are intended to spy that era.

My layman interpretation of it all is that there wasn't a big bang, rather a crunch. Transformation of pure energy, god if you like, swirling around at the speed of light (c) and hence timeless/eternal, where large amounts of energy transformed into matter (takes much energy to form even a little matter). Which slowed things down, and created time. Commonly called the big bang - but where such naming infers actual expansion/explosion and the conception that the universe is expanding outward into areas outside of that space - but isn't, rather the suggestion is that space itself, the space between physical objects, is expanding. I instead prefer to conceptualise it as the objects themselves decreasing in size over time.

Earlier matter relatively quickly transitioned/decayed back into energy, like how a floating fire ember might quickly halve and halve again, but decay to a single dot that persists for relatively longer. When all matter everywhere is in decay but in a non linear way, where smaller/newer persists for longer so we envisage more distant matter to be decaying relatively quicker - as we're looking back through time at older/larger more quickly decaying objects. Hence the Hubble constant 45 miles per second per 3.25 million light years seemingly faster 'expansion' (matter decay) conceptualisation.

A forward ultimate universal transition of all matter decaying back into just pure energy and time standing still, but taking forever longer to get there. Matter isn't really something physical, rather its entangled energy, patches of random swirling energy that gets locked into a pattern/point. An illusion of something physical. A light particle for instance is both a wave and a particle, alternates between the two. sometimes positive, sometimes negative, averages nought, all in a self perpetuating manner (pushes/pulls itself along).

Will we ever get to converse with aliens? I don't think so. Of all of everything across all of time aliens will come and go, but with such short timescales in the scale of things, and at such vast distances that two encountering each other and being able to communicate is nigh on impossible. We may however get to a point where we can identify that a prior intelligent alien race existed at some point in time, as in how in another century or two when human life of earth is gone others may detect our prior existence. I do however suspect that we may find life elsewhere, even locally within our own galaxy, but just not where coincidentally 'intelligent' capable of communicating with each other life arises at the same time and within close enough region to have a meaningful conversation.

[XFool]

The James Webb telescope is of course limited to visible light

Nooo! It is specifically an infra-red telescope. That defines pretty well everything about its design, location and operating temperature (very cold).

[Bubblesofearth]

Recent article describes the Edinburgh galaxy;

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-62311562

From which;

The red smudge is 35 billion light-years away. We see it, as it was, just 235 million years after the Big Bang.
It's a preliminary, or "candidate", result and will need a follow-up study for confirmation.
But for the moment, the University of Edinburgh team is celebrating and marvelling at James Webb's power.
"We're using a telescope that was designed to do precisely this kind of thing, and it's amazing," said Callum Donnan, an astrophysics PhD student in the university's Institute for Astronomy.
James Webb is the $10bn successor to the Hubble Space Telescope and is hunting the first stars and galaxies to form in the 13.8-billion-year-old Universe.

How can the galaxy be 35bn LY's away if the universe is only 13.8bn years old?

Is this a mistake or am I missing something/

BoE

[pje16]

How can the galaxy be 35bn LY's away if the universe is only 13.8bn years old?
BoE

More than one universe

PS Am I the only one who can't get my head round those sort of distances