The James Webb Space Telescope

[Ave IT]

Indulge me here but I'm a sucker for this stuff and always have been ..... but if you have some free time to let your mind, imagination and spirit soar ….. have a look and ponder on some of these wonderful images sent back from the JWST (James Webb Space Telescope). Best viewed full screen on a decent lap-top rather than a phone. If you click on an individual image you then get a brief scientific/ technical description of what you are looking at and how it was created.

https://esawebb.org/images/?

Some are genuinely beautiful works of art in their own right but for my money are elevated when you try, even for a few fleeting moments, to get your head around what the image represents. It is quite literally awesome (to use that much abused word in its true meaning).

The sections on Nebulae and Stars are the most visually stunning …. although my personal favourite to gaze at is in the galaxy section entitled ‘A spiral amongst thousands’ . Wow! Just Wow!

NERD ALERT ….. These images are not something we could actually ever ‘see’. The JWST just sends back a stream of data from sensors and then this is translated into pictures that we can then view. So even ignoring the brain-dead conspiracy theorists who claim it’s all fake it is legitimate to ask if this ‘translation’ into these glorious photos have been so heavily manipulated as to be meaningless PR. The article below explains how and why this is done and why the images are indeed representative of what is really ‘out there’ – because our puny eyes are only capable of seeing (detecting) a tiny slice of the electromagnetic spectrum (the optical wavelengths) but JWST has sensors that can ‘see’ the full range that we are totally blind to. So the JWST gives us the power to shift the other parts of the spectrum into our own optical realm – allowing us to peer though dust and clouds and visualise what is truly there. There’s nothing fake about it -it gives us a super power and a window on the wonders of the universe.

https://qz.com/2188123/the-james-webb-space-telescope-images-arent-faked-theyre-designed#:~:text=The James Webb Space Telescope delivered astounding images of the,They are data visualizations!

 

[Lousy Pint]

Thanks for posting this Ave IT.
I love this stuff too, even though I am no scientist and most of the info is mind-bogglingly confusing to say the least and WAY over my head!
Some of the numbers, distances and time-frames are just unbelievable, which makes it all so fascinating.
I first thought 'wow' when I read something many years ago, which said something like 'a pulsar from the crab nebula, the size of a sugar cube, would weigh about 100 million tons.' One hundred million tons!! Incredible.

 

[Lancastergreen]

These things are what make me tick in real life, I have a telescope and love viewing Jupiter, I have had the pleasure of looking at the Sun thanks to the use of filters and simple objects like the moon.
Trying to get your head around things is probably why a lot of people dispute what is really out there, they just about accept there being planets in our solar system, so for them to believe there are trillions of stars and planets elsewhere is for them far fetched.
If you could just get them to look through a telescope and look at the planets, the horse head nebulae or Betelgeuse, they might start believing things, but these are the same kinds of people who think we have never walked on the Moon.
The images sent back by these special telescopes are something to behold, they are magical and if you allow yourself just for a moment, gives you a chance to admire the beauty of pure nature, unaltered by man.
I recall telling people once in a presentation about the sizes of Earth, Jupiter and the Sun as a small example and simplistic to understand, of what is right in front of us.
1000 Earths can fit inside Jupiter, 1000 Jupiter's can fit inside the Sun... People say wow, they don't understand because frankly how can you?
The sun is 93 million miles from Earth, takes 8.5 minutes for light to reach us, takes just 3 days to get to the moon which is approx. 250000 miles away depending when in the year, and people begin to wonder a little until you mention the next fact.
93 Million miles from the sun and 600 million miles (give or take depending on time of year) from Earth to Jupiter but the famous (if you know it) Betelgeuse star in Orion's belt, due to supernova within 100000 years, would itself stretch from the Sun to Jupiter on its own....
The Sun is almost 1 million miles wide, you cannot even begin to imagine that but Betelgeuse is a whopping 700 million miles wide!
This is probably, in simple terms, why people cannot understand or want to believe in things outside of the basics because you simply cannot understand the sizes or as Lousy Pint says, understanding how something the size of a teaspoon can weigh trillions of tonnes, but it's still something I love and wish others could just start to wonder.
It is all there in the sky to view, naked eye, binoculars or telescope, NASA website, whichever, its the best natural thing out there yet its basically ignored.

 

[unhinched]

So even ignoring the brain-dead conspiracy theorists who claim it’s all fake

Any groups doing this or just the odd individual twitter user ?
There's a conspiracy theory for almost everything these days. Occasionally they prove true. Most are not worth mentioning.
Some high end scientists like Prajwal Niraula have their reservations about the JWST accuracy, but I guess it's just a case of whether its suitably accurate yet, not that it's a complete load of rubbish.
I'm not massively into this telescope stuff, but it does inspire wonder and awe and the ' findings' don't surprise me.
The only criticism I've seen is that it cost 10 billion of taxpayers money - which those who love it will be happy to finance, others less so. But that's the nature of taxes I guess.
I don't know the precise amount of taxpayers in the US, but I guess it works out at about £50 / head. And you're getting it for free Ave'IT , so no wonder you and the rest above are happy.

 

[Quinny]

The only criticism I've seen is that it cost 10 billion of taxpayers money - which those who love it will be happy to finance, others less so. But that's the nature of taxes I guess.
I don't know the precise amount of taxpayers in the US, but I guess it works out at about £50 / head. And you're getting it for free Ave'IT , so no wonder you and the rest above are happy.

It cost a little over $10billion ever since the project started in the late 90s, so that's not bad. And that - let's say $400 million a year on the project - is peanuts in 'Murican terms to their military spending of over $800billion a year.

I'd much rather waste tax-payers money on telescopes.

 

[Ave IT]

Any groups doing this or just the odd individual twitter user ?
There's a conspiracy theory for almost everything these days. Occasionally they prove true. Most are not worth mentioning.
Some high end scientists like Prajwal Niraula have their reservations about the JWST accuracy, but I guess it's just a case of whether its suitably accurate yet, not that it's a complete load of rubbish.
I'm not massively into this telescope stuff, but it does inspire wonder and awe and the ' findings' don't surprise me.
The only criticism I've seen is that it cost 10 billion of taxpayers money - which those who love it will be happy to finance, others less so. But that's the nature of taxes I guess.
I don't know the precise amount of taxpayers in the US, but I guess it works out at about £50 / head. And you're getting it for free Ave'IT , so no wonder you and the rest above are happy.

At the risk of this becoming like one of those posts on the old ‘Opinions’ board I’m gonna bite…..

It’s fantastic value for money on so many levels. The $10 billion is the ‘lifetime cost' – right from the early 2000s and first five years of operation – which is apparently about 0.0095% of US public spending between 2003 and 2026. Think of all the trillions spent on weapons and all sorts of other appalling & pointless crap in that time. This is something that at its heart is purely about seeking knowledge of the universe and about our place within it just for its own sake. That alone is (for once) surely something for humanity to be proud of ?

But it’s discoveries will inevitably go way beyond that – science always does. We cannot predict what the ripples of the discoveries it uncovers will be – anymore than when Ferdinand and Isabella agreed to fund the voyage of Columbus – simply because we don’t know what we don’t know. What may now seem like abstract self-indulgent scientific debates about things like dark energy or quantum coupling may yet transform human society, or just as likely it’ll be something stumbled upon that nobody has even dreamed about yet.

But even if we didn’t get one iota of spin-offs (which is utterly infeasible given all past experience) it’s not just “telescope stuff” - and its findings are already astonishing. Don’t you want to know if our own solar system is some kind of unique freak amongst the hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way? The first exoplanet was found in 1992 – since then over 4,000 other solar systems have been found yet not one really resembles our own. We don’t know if that’s because our own is a freak or if we just haven't been able to detect ones like ours so well i.e. there is a selection bias at work. The JWST will nail that answer for sure.

That then has implications about the likelihood of life elsewhere which is something else JWST is uniquely equipped to help answer. Incredible human ingenuity means JWST can analyse atmospheres in many of these exoplanets thousands of light years away by looking for tell-tale signals of organic molecules or even...... at the risk of getting very speculative....the chemical finger print of life together with industrial atmospheres like our own. How amazing would that be? That’s the thing about JWST – it could change the way we see ourselves and answer some of the most profound questions ever posed.

Now doesn't sound better value for money than a new hyper-sonic missile? 😉

 

[Guiri Green]

I love reading and watching of our forays into space and discoveries being made at distances we must all struggle to comprehend or appreciate, if only to remind ourselves of our insignificance it terms of size relative to our own and every single other galaxy out there.

I was a NASA kid and followed the Apollo missions, regularly looking up at the moon through my plastic kids binoculars, trying to relate what I saw to the Moon globe on my bedroom window sill, I naively thought I'd see the moon rover and brave guys as they went about their business.

I've visited the Space Center in Florida and saw how the astronauts were basically bolted onto the front of a huge rocket and wondered if I could ever have that courage, this was further appreciated a few years ago when I visited the Smithsonian Museum in Washington and saw a Lunar Module up close and just how basic and agricultural some of the technology was. I recognised some of the parts as they were similar to things I've seen in the Submarine world. Fascinating.

When looking at the images trying to understand that we're looking at the past, I wonder if anyone else thinks of our planet, us, and thinks "is this it?" are we all the universe has to offer ? It's frightening to think we may be as we slowly kill ourselves and our very own life support system.

As a youngster, I was convinced that one day within my lifetime, we'd make contact with other life and perhaps discover the truth of who, what and why we're here. Imagine an event like that and how religion, poltics and conflict might become irrelevant overnight.

 

[mervyn]

Absolutely love this subject. Would really recommend the IMAX film showing the Hubble pictures taken after the faulty lens was replaced. Saw it on the biggest IMAX screen in Melbourne some years ago, and it was mind blowing. A great post.

 

[Ave IT]

Well folks....
Just in case you happened to miss the April 1996 edition of Astronomy Now magazine ... you won't have seen this picture of the 'Cygnus rift' region of the Milky Way that officially makes me a professional astro-photographer by winning a cool £25 for reader's photo of the month 😎.... Who needs JWST eh?

 

[Mat]

We’re just sentient dust ‘living’ inside a giant continuous explosion, so with all that going on I don’t think that was too much cheese in my sandwich today at all.

 

[Andy S]

'Cos there's bugger all here on Earth!

 

[MickyD]

Some high end scientists like Prajwal Niraula have their reservations about the JWST accuracy, but I guess it's just a case of whether its suitably accurate yet, not that it's a complete load of rubbish.

You link to a paper that was published on 15th September 2022, only two months after JWST calibration at L2 was concluded and well before it got down to serious business. Furthermore, a click on that date shows that the paper was received on 2nd November 2021, before JWST was even launched - and the free preview of the paper mentions nothing more than the targeted precision of JWST in Cycle 1. Last but by no means least, the preview addresses only a relatively small aspect of JWST's capabilities, namely exoplanet atmosphere anaylsis.

So, quite why this poor Prajwal Niraula chappie was dragged into this thread is the real mystery here. Assuming you have no ulterior motives and no wish to sow doubt in the minds of casual readers, you really need a few lessons in how to do your own research.

Like some others on here I'd been following JWST's painfully slow progress for years, and I even watched the launch live on Christmas Day 2021 - a far more inspiring experience than any of those Catholic masses I was dragged to as a kid and teenager - and I could cite countless actually pertinent and up-to-date links that show that JWST has been staggeringly successful and in many areas has far exceeded expectations. (But so could anyone else - those links are everywhere.) It's 'suitably accurate', all right.

I just hope I'm still around for HabEx, LUVOIR and the rest. In the shorter term, I hope to embrace Nancy Grace Roman fairly soon.

 

[Andy S]

No more politics crap on this thread please gents.