James Webb Space Telescope

[Replies From View]

Push out middle bit of Mars and pop lens in instead

[Replies From View]

I wonder what size of mirror they have on Mars

[NoSleep]

You'll need a large telescope to find out.

[Replies From View]

Have to collect together seven of the largest ones, according to these instructions I am holding

[touchingcloth]

I wonder what size of mirror they have on Mars

I keep saying that it needs to be Mars size. Maybe if possible they could make one that fits between the rings of Saturn, but that might be too large to manufacture in practice so Mars is the sensible choice. An alternative option would be to move to Mars and make a telescope of earth.

I'm sick of all of this "oh, this new telescopes is bigger than the last one but they're already planning a bigger telescopes". Just do what they did with the Empire Estate Building and make something which is the largest possible thing where no one can come along and say they've made a larger one.

[Replies From View]

I keep saying that it needs to be Mars size. Maybe if possible they could make one that fits between the rings of Saturn, but that might be too large to manufacture in practice so Mars is the sensible choice. An alternative option would be to move to Mars and make a telescope of earth.

I'm sick of all of this "oh, this new telescopes is bigger than the last one but they're already planning a bigger telescopes". Just do what they did with the Empire Estate Building and make something which is the largest possible thing where no one can come along and say they've made a larger one.

Do you or do you not think they should settle on a Mars one before ultimately working towards a Saturn one.

[touchingcloth]

Do you or do you not think they should settle on a Mars one before ultimately working towards a Saturn one.

If a Saturn one is possible, build that. If not, build a Mars one. If an Earth one is possible, move to Mars.

[Replies From View]

Would we need bigger eyes to make the most of it?

[PlanktonSideburns]

Would we need bigger eyes to make the most of it?

No, quite a silly question really

[Replies From View]

I don't know - I think that sooner or later we're going to have to confess that our eyes are no longer big enough to get the full benefit of all this technology.

[beanheadmcginty]

They are looking at using a crater on the moon to measure super stretched early cosmic radio waves, if that tickles your giant telescopic fancy

LCRT

That's no moon...

[touchingcloth]

I don't know - I think that sooner or later we're going to have to confess that our eyes are no longer big enough to get the full benefit of all this technology.

I was thinking that when they make the MARS scope that they'll need to make the highest resolution tellies possible, like TEN MILLION K or whatever the maximum is. But then I thought, what if they just made a single massive pixel? Like if tempeh turned the moon into a pixel. We could look at the Messy galaxy with that.

[Replies From View]

why did they name all these things after chocolate bars as well.  every time I try out cinemascope nowadays I'm craving a josh webb choc ice due to nasa's endless promotional issues

[touchingcloth]

The Rowntrees CinemaScope was a great bar of choc. 

[Alberon]

Taken in the infrared here's a false colour image of Jupiter.



The storms reflect more sunlight apparently so they're coloured white. At the poles you can see the aurora in full swing. Also in the picture you can see Jupiter's ring and a couple of moons and some galaxies.

In other news a couple of independent teams are questioning some of the candidates the telescope has found for the oldest galaxies. Galaxies distance is usually partly determined by redshift. The faster a galaxy is moving away from us the further away it is. But it has been suggested that some imposter galaxies look like they have a higher redshift because they are dusty. The dust absorbs the bluer light leaving the galaxy looking redder.

Based on how red the galaxy appears to JWST, astronomers had determined a redshift of 17 to 18 for CEERS-DSFG-1, placing it just 220 million years after the Big Bang. Yet a team led by Jorge Zavala of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan used the NOEMA (Northern Extended Millimeter Array) submillimeter telescope in France to detect this distant galaxy and find that it contains huge amounts of dust.

Dust absorbs shorter, bluer wavelengths of starlight while allowing longer, redder wavelengths to pass, meaning that a dusty galaxy can mimic the redness of a higher redshift galaxy. Once this was taken into account, Zavala's team calculated a redshift of just 5 for CEERS-DSFG-1, placing it some 12.5 billion years ago, 1.3 billion years after the Big Bang. It's still old and far away, but not to any record-breaking length.

Far from being bad news, discovering more galaxies at redshift 5 is actually crucial for a better understanding of how galaxies grew during that period in the history of the universe.

Interstellar dust is a by-product of the cycle of star-birth and death. To produce enough dust to sufficiently redden its light, CEERS-DSFG-1 must be producing stars at a rate of 150 solar masses per year, 50 times greater than the rate at which stars are currently forming in our Milky Way galaxy.

According to astronomers' models, galaxies with so much dust and star formation could have existed 1.3 billion years after the Big Bang, but they are thought to have been relatively rare.

"If we found a large number of these galaxies with JWST, the observations would start to be in tension with the models," Zavala told Space.com.

It might just be that such galaxies are more common than previously thought. Zavala's team also followed up on two more galaxies with claimed high redshifts — Maisie's Galaxy at a redshift of 14.3 placing it 280 million years after the Big Bang, and a redshift 16.7 galaxy found just 250 million years after the Big Bang.

https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-impostor-distant-galaxies

[touchingcloth]

I'd like to see the rings of Uranus.

[Replies From View]

Maisie is not a name I would associate with 280 million years after the Big Bang.  Just goes to show that fashions are cyclical.

[All Surrogate]

Taken in the infrared here's a false colour image of Jupiter.

I was going to post that if no-one else had. It's gorgeous.

[touchingcloth]

Looks like an anus, and that's before you even see the rings.

[Mr Trumpet]

"Your anus", imagine calling a planet that, what a bunch of fucking clowns

[Mr_Simnock]

For some fucking stupid reason a lot of new and interesting images from Webb lately you have to go trawling round twitter and reddit for instead of them just releasing them as and when. I have no idea why but anything space related is just so much better represented online by Euro stuff, I don't get it. Anyway -- NGC1365 the very heart of the galaxy (NIRCAM)



and via the MIRI cam



Stars in the megallanic cloud

[Mr_Simnock]

Good to see a lot of people getting raw images for themselves and doing their own processing

Galaxy IC5332 (MIRI)



Galaxy NGC682 (MIRI)



NGC is for New General Catalogue (of Nebulae and Clusters of stars), it is a list of over 7,000 objects compiled in Ireland by Danish Astronomer J Dreyer.

IC is for Index Catalogue, done by the same bloke and a sort of addendum of the NGC.

Astronomy is obsessed by 2 things, obtaining spectra and compiling catalogues of objects, at least 70% of all work at the very least at a lot of observatories covers either one or the other, the same goes for most satellites/space observatories.

[Crenners]

Boring universe

[Mr_Simnock]

Boring universe

some people are never happy, don't know they are born, never appreci....

[Replies From View]

I wonder whether anyone has planted a tiny TARDIS within a high resolution version of any of these images, as an Easter egg.

[Alberon]

New images of a direct observation of an exoplanet. The four pictures are in different ranges of the infrared spectrum.

"This is really a historic moment for astronomy," said Prof Sasha Hinkley, an astronomer based at the University of Exeter, who co-led the observations. "James Webb is going to open the door to a whole new class of planets that have been completely out of reach to us and by observing them at a broad range of wavelengths we can study their compositions in a much more in-depth way.

"We will be able to detect the presence of weather."

Directly imaging exoplanets is a huge technical challenge because the host star is so much brighter. The focus of the latest observations, HIP 65426 b, is a gas giant about five to 10 times the mass of Jupiter located 385 light-years from Earth in the Centaurus constellation.

The latest observations put the planet's atmospheric temperature at roughly 1,300C (2,370F) and suggest its atmosphere contains red-hued clouds of silicate dust. "It would be a terrible place to live," said Hinkley. "You'd be roasted alive if you could float around in the atmosphere."

Previously, astronomers have obtained direct images of 20 or so exoplanets, including HIP 65426 b, using ground-based telescopes. But this meant contending with noise introduced by the Earth's atmosphere and restricted observations to a narrow range of visible wavelengths. By contrast, the latest images, captured from the cold, airless environment of space, span a wide range of wavelengths, including the infrared, which accounts for most of the light produced in the planet's atmosphere.

"The best wavelength to observe a planet is the one at which it produces the most intrinsic light because this is directly tied to the temperature of the planet," said Dr Beth Biller, a co-principal investigator and an astronomer at the University of Edinburgh.

HIP 65426 b is only 10-20 million years old, far younger than the 4.5bn-year-old Earth, and the latest observations give new insights into how Jupiter and Saturn may have looked in their infancy.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/sep/01/historic-james-webb-images-show-exoplanet-unprecedented-detail

[Bence Fekete]

"It would be a terrible place to live," said Hinkley.

If you were human aye

[touchingcloth]

Unlike earth, which fucking whips.

[Aaron500]

"We will be able to detect the presence of weather."

I look forward to receiving a daily forecast for Hip 65426b, 385 light-years away. On a blurred and pixellated map. A really historic moment.

[PlanktonSideburns]

Unlike earth, which fucking whips.

Really made me laugh