Deepest infrared image of universe | Hacker News Reader

Deepest infrared image of universe

nasa.gov

1,136 pointsl-347 comments

Higher Resolution Images available here: https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/038/01G...

Full-Res 4537x4630 PNG (28.51 MB): https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01G7JJADTH90FR98AKKJFKSS0B.png

Hubble's capture of the same area: https://bigthink.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/smacs0723-73... and a gif comparison vs the JWST: https://i.redd.it/9uyhwijeo0b91.gif posted by /u/WhatEvery1sThinking on Reddit.

Thanks for finding those images! I threw together a page that lets you compare them via a slider. You should be able to zoom in on mobile!

https://blog.wolfd.me/hubble-jwst/

The .gif comparison was a bit... upsetting since the color palettes are so limited and the resolution is so low, so it really didn't put JWST _or_ Hubble in a good light.

This is incredibly useful. Thank you!

would it make sense to balance the two images in terms of brightness? the hubble one just seems dimmer.

There is some extra "pinpoint" clarity in the Webb image, but it doesn't show (for instance) a bunch of new stuff, I was surprised at that.

There is definitely new stuff there – if you look closely.

The new stuff is of course faint and small. Otherwise Hubble would have seen it!

It looks like restoration of an old painting where the aged, yellowed varnish is stripped away to reveal the (much brighter and more detailed) original painting below.

Couldn’t you just do basic photo touch ups to get the Hubble to look about the same???

No. Webb looks deeper into the infrared and can see galaxies that Hubble can't see. There're some red galaxies in Webb (upper-right especially) that aren't in Hubble's at all.

amazing progress

All the very red galaxies in the JWST image are mostly or completely invisible in the Hubble image. That’s because they’re so redshifted that they’re out of the spectrum Hubble can see. Those are the galaxies that are really far away.

Here's a variant of that GIF that separates out the blue, blue+green, and blue+green+red channels, to (hopefully) highlight which differences are due to the longer wavelengths (and which look more like exposure time difference). Webb's color mapping roughly aligns with the RGB channels, so I think this is meaningful [0].

https://i.ibb.co/D8dW6v5/jwst.webp

[0] https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/038/01G...

("...the assigned colors are: Red: F444W Orange: F356W Green: F200W + F277W Blue: F090W + F150W")

Steps to reproduce:

    convert 9uyhwijeo0b91.gif[1] -resize 4537x4630 aligned-hst.png
    cp STScI-01G7JJADTH90FR98AKKJFKSS0B.png jwst-rgb.png
    convert jwst-rgb.png -channel R -fx "u*0" jwst-gb.png
    convert jwst-gb.png -channel G -fx "u*0" jwst-b.png
    convert -delay 150 -loop 0 jwst-{b,gb,rgb}.png aligned-hst.png my.gif
    ffmpeg -i my.gif -loop 0 my.webp

Comparing both images, there is a perfectly round red dot that's just a few pixels wide, a little up from the most prominent star, which doesn't correspond to another object in Hubble's image. Is that an image artifact or some laser guide?

Could be an internal reflection. The optical path for many JWST instruments is, uh, compact: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Videos/2021/09/Webb_MIRI_... (Every kilo on telescope structure you save by folding the optical path is a kilo you can add in propellant, extending the working life of the spacecraft)

Instrument internals are painted black and heavily baffled, but nothing in optics is perfect. Dithering the direction the telescope is pointed in and image stacking should cancel out most optical artifacts, but internal reflections will be worse for bright objects like stars, which JWST probably isn't usually going to be observing with the imaging instruments.

It is a bit suspicious looking, but there's a lot of very red objects that the Hubble image doesn't catch. Presuming that the red colors in the images are the deeper infrared wavelengths (and thus the most heavily-redshifted objects) I would guess that Hubble just didn't have the detectors to see those.

Aren't the red ones moving really fast away from us and the white ones more "stationary" from our point in the universe?

Yes, that's generally true. Galaxies that are redshifted are moving very fast relative to us. But the only reason for them to be moving so fast is due to the expansion of the universe, and these galaxies being sufficiently far away.

The large white elliptical galaxies in the center of the image are in the "foreground", while the orange-ish galaxies are much farther away in the background. This is why the light from the more distant galaxies is curved and distorted by the foreground objects, creating the lensing effect that we see.

Hubbles law says that astronomical objects that are further away also move away from us more quickly with the constant of proportionality being the Hubble constant

Same comparison zoomed into my favorite part without motion: https://twitter.com/sprigland/status/1546633629236748294

Incredible. If each of those galaxies has on average a few hundred billion stars (our is estimated to have between 100b-400b), and each of those little dots is an entire galaxy, well, that's a lot of stars in this image.

People use the term mind-blowing loosely but it really fits here. That’s an utterly astounding, incomprehensible number of stars.

And this image is “roughly the size of a grain of sand held at arms length” of the night sky.

> And this image is “roughly the size of a grain of sand held at arms length” of the night sky.

For a more specific measurement: NASA says 2.4 arcminutes across[0].

[0]: https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/038/01G...

a brief peek into infinity

Not really - there is a fairly definite ending about 13.4b light years into the image.

Lots of planets, too. Some, with life.

Since we're looking at objects billions of light years away, we're looking billions of years into the past. In the context of extragalactic life, it's a bit sad to me that even if we somehow spotted it at those insane distances, in the early versions of those galaxies we see, odds are that it'll be gone by now, and we'll likely be gone by the time any lucky photons born in our solar system can reach those places, too. Even so, it's cool to think that the odds of life being out there somewhere in a universe so vast are really quite good, inaccessible as it may be.

Or maybe not. If you consider how improbable is the origin of life on the earth then maybe it's not even enough planets in the observable universe to start a life. But the universe is much greater than its observable part.

Everything without life is out there the ones with life are all on earth yo NASA spends all its money on how to lie

If I knew JavaScript I would make a bookmarklet that makes it slowly pan over the full-res version, stopping periodically.

Since I don't, I made a poster of crops: https://twitter.com/KyeFox/status/1546629778349907968

Some that I found quite interesting:

https://ibb.co/zPvxrFT

https://ibb.co/NYsp9Jw

https://ibb.co/wJDQ7XM

https://ibb.co/yf8RTM2

https://ibb.co/d72g9Jx

https://ibb.co/BBPvFZf

https://ibb.co/567Z9RC

https://ibb.co/Hpm43Xr

https://ibb.co/JBhmCxL

https://ibb.co/PMYqnXb

Some of those shapes are just incredible, like the 4th that looks like a glimpse of what will happen shortly after the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy will collide in a few billion years.

There's a great animation of it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_co...

Can you elaborate why you found those interesting?

Mainly because most of the pictures I usually see of the galaxies in space, they appear as practically identical dots. Never before I've seen this level of detail and the variety of shapes. Each of these galaxies have billions of stars and planets and they are billions of such galaxies. I know we have read these numbers before but just seeing them "up-close" like this in such a small section just makes it that much more real.

Just imagine how much more vivid they would appear once the technology progresses ever further.

I created a webp comparison: https://ibb.co/9ZjpLnV

James Webp?

Wow I love how things that were dots or haze with Hubble are brilliant spirals and galaxies in the JWST image. Absolutely amazing!

I always wonder if we had a sensitive enough instrument, would it get more difficult to pick out individual galaxies? Or, are there enough galaxies that an image taken by a very sensitive telescope would have no black areas?

Highly recommend the full-res image - brings out a great deal of character from a lot of the galaxies that is just not visible in the zoomed-out image.

How about 1.4 Gigapixel image of the galaxy? The new photos by @NASAWebb are stunning. Let's Enhance's AI made them super high res for you to enjoy the clearest view of the Universe.

Download: 80MP/140MB https://drive.google.com/file/d/150VhXVEfYXmr70LrrZxQ50pU0u5...

1.4GP/2.5GB (note: not every image viewer can handle a file this big) https://drive.google.com/file/d/14x__QDUmrIvLnlxoSOksu3mgpeX...

I've created a zoom & pan version of the full-resolution image - https://example.sirvtest.com/nasa/universe.html

What is the exposure difference between the Hubble and JWST images?

I couldn't find an exact exposure time for the Hubble image, the press release by the ESA has this quote though: "This deep field, taken by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), is a composite made from images at different wavelengths, totaling 12.5 hours – achieving depths at infrared wavelengths beyond the Hubble Space Telescope’s deepest fields, which took weeks." [1] There is also another comment further down this thread stating Hubble was 140 hours. [2]

[1] https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2022/07/Webb_s_fir... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32063214

Those exposure times (weeks / 140 hours) are for these images [0,1], Hubble's deep fields. Hubble's photo of this galaxy cluster, the one our root comment shows superimposed over JWST's, took 5 Hubble orbits [2]. I think that's around 2-3 hours of exposure time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Deep_Field

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-Deep_Field

[2] https://archive.stsci.edu/prepds/relics/ ("For each cluster, the team observed to 5-orbit depth with ACS and WFC3/IR")

(If you want to verify [2] is talking about the same photo, you can retrieve it from the "SMACS J0723.3-7327" row, from the "Color Images" column/field).

LEO should be >= 80 mins so 5 hubble orbits should be >= 400 mins / 6.6 hrs?

EDIT: nasa.gov says 95 mins, so ~8 hrs.

> This deep field, taken by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), is a composite made from images at different wavelengths, totaling 12.5 hours – achieving depths at infrared wavelengths beyond the Hubble Space Telescope’s deepest fields, which took weeks.

12.5 hours total exposure for the JWST image, "weeks" for the HST image

Is the actual comparison HST image being used here from the hubble deep field?

EDIT: Doesn't look like it is -- it is from a more recent 2019-published study of SMACS J0723.3-732 as part of the Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey (RELICS).

Some background info in this paper:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.05007.pdf

Although that paper does mention that this image is the deepest image of the Universe to date, and that the Fine Guidance Sensor image may be the second deepest, both exceeding the Hubble Deep Field image.

I think it was around 20 days for the Hubble and around 12 hours for the JWT

I'm impressed that one of the first Webb images was a deep-field view.

Hubble's own Deep Field image required about 140 hours of imaging (divided amongst 4 bandwidths and ~150 separate imaging events). Webb's own view took a little over 12 hours. I was expecting nearer and brighter objects to be first targets. Impressive as heck.

Though of course, Hubble paved the way and showed that deep-field imaging is useful and provides insights.

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

For comparison the SMACS 0723 image used for reference in the JWST image target selection nnouncement recently:

https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2022/07/hlsp_relics_hst...

I was honestly slightly underwhelmed by the improvement in detail until I saw your comment about the exposure times. Now my mind is utterly blown, thank you.

I don’t think most of the comparison images so far have really demonstrated the difference in quality and resolution, but this gif does: https://twitter.com/jason4short/status/1546633395643432961?s...

I need to double-check the colour-to-wavelength mapping, but I suspect many of the redder objects in the image would be entirely invisible to the Hubble simply by being beyond its sensor range in the IR spectrum.

Right, the longest wavelength filter here is 4.4 µm [0]. In Hubble's version, the reddest filter they use is 1.6 µm on WFC3/IR [1] (which I believe is Hubble's reddest overall and limited by its optics). Four of the six filters used are outside Hubble's range.

[0] "In this case, the assigned colors are: Red: F444W Orange: F356W Green: F200W + F277W Blue: F090W + F150W"

https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/038/01G...

[1] https://archive.stsci.edu/prepds/relics/

The level of detail completely blows away other deep field images.

I was also underwhelmed until I zoomed alllllll the way in. Try it.

I imagine in the future they will also run the JWST with a long exposure and the Hubble to get even more details?

I am not an astrophysicist or photographer for that matter... But wouldn't it be like a overexposed photo -- all red-and-white, because it will catch so much light from the distant galaxies and such?

To an extent, yes, which is why DSF images tend to be aimed at "empty" sections of sky.

There are a few factors involved AFAIU:

- You don't want to be shooting through the Milky Way's own primary mass as nearby dust and gas will obstruct more distant objects.

- "Nearby" objects --- stars within the Milky Way, reasonably nearby galaxies --- might also tend to blow out the image. Though for the most part these end up being point sources. It's artefacts such as spikes which give the most obstruction.

In the case of the JWST, the fact that it's looking into the infrared means that it can see object which are literally invisible to Hubble regardless of how long the exposure.

The question of why space is black (or alternatively: why it's not uniformly light) is known as Olber's Paradox or "the dark-sky paradox", and dates back to the time of Keppler. Effectively: the universe has a finite age, and there is not an infinite number of stars (or other light sources) as one goes back in time.

https://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/questions/que...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers%27_paradox

There is a uniform illumination of the Universe that can be detected, as microwave radiation, known as the cosmic backgroud radiation. That occurs well below JWST's sensor range (0.6–28.3 μm), however, with a peak wavelength of about 1 mm.

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

Regarding Olber's paradox, would an infinite number of stars really imply the sky would be uniformly bright? Why couldn't (say) the following alternative explanations work?

(a) The universe is infinite, but has been (and will always be) stretching faster than would allow light from galaxies too far away to ever reach us.

(b) The universe is infinite and not even stretching, but there is enough (dark?) matter in it to eventually block any ray of light coming from infinitely far away.

Your comment is one of the best - and short explanations, for the arguement and understanding of, the "finite universe". Thanks for that.

When people talk about how much time it takes for an astronomical image to be captured, they mean the total time involved over many, many, many individual shots. All of those images are then "stacked" with fancy algorithms to generate the final image.

This is how these images of very dim, distant galaxies are created without foreground stars blowing out the whole image.

This image stacking technology has crept in to smartphone cameras in the last handful of years, most prominently as "night mode".

From researching a couple of earlier comments here: a chief reason the Hubble DSF was composed of multiple images was to eliminate individual cosmic ray events which otherwise fog / degrade such images.

If you're interested in distant constant objects, then near-transient signals can be safely ignored and removed.

Yes and no. It's not a kodak moment. "Camera" there basically squints hard and blinks often and then fancy algorithms reconstruct a full image based on that.

The basic (in photography) is that you can counter balance exposure time with the opening of the lens; the less light gets in, the longer it gets to take a well exposed picture (basically). But since it’s all digital you can also counterbalance higher and lower exposure zones to grab the details that would have been over or under exposed (hdr)… unsure of how these basic photography rules would work out in this case… could anyone elaborate ?

Dabbler in photography, general familiarity with astronomy:

The goals are to maximise light capture (the objects being imaged are dim and distant), whilst miniising any degredation from other factors. JWST doesn't ahve to deal with skyglow, daylight, or satellite interference. It may still be seeing other solar system bodies (depending on where it's aiming), but mostly would be subject to cosmic-ray interference, probably impacting on the light sensor itself.

Since those are essnetially instantaneous and randomly distributed with time, by "stacking" images and filtering out transient events (taking an average or median brightness AFAIU).

I'm not sure to what extend HDR is used in astronomical imaging.

There is a lot of post-processing and palette selection to apply colours to what are just intensity maps at a given frequency.

https://astrobackyard.com/tutorials/stack-exposures/

https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/astrophotography/astropho...

no, that would be a single exposure (aka single integration). There’s so many reasons not to do that over many days. You take multiple exposures and stack them and mask bright things around saturation during coaddition

Would this be similar to HDR?

I know this is whistling in the wind, but the Webb telescope just fills me with such hope and excitement. I feel generally so down about the state of the world, but when I think about the sheer complexity of the Webb telescope and how it has basically gone as well as anyone could hope, it just makes me happy. Deep thanks and gratitude to the huge number of people who worked so hard on this project.

Thank you for this. It really is heartening to see amazing science done for its sake. Something not horrible for a change.

Me too! A lot of the recent advances in space travel/ exploration whilst techically impressive (space X's reusable rockets, starlink etc.) just don't really spark joy or wonder in the way that the Webb telscope has for me.

I am giddy about what we will see once they start pointing it at nearby exoplanets.

Slightly brighter dots. You’re not going to be able to get a multi pixel image of an exoplanet with JWST.

There is good exoplanet science to be done, like atmosphere spectroscopy. But not direct imaging, other than as points of light.

Reminds me of this - https://cdn.quotesgram.com/img/53/30/1253009639-7ab83ab4c9b8...

Looking at a picture like this makes me feel deeply that we can’t only be the single intelligent life out there in space.

Also, makes me want to start watching Star Trek again

Wow, you can really see the gravitational lensing on that one.

I was wondering which of the 5 photos [1] they'd tease today (remaining 4 are coming tomorrow). My guess was also gonna be the deep field one, especially since it maps nicely to the well known Hubble photo. But now it begs the question, how does this one compare to the Hubble one in terms of scale/angle.

[1] https://petapixel.com/2022/07/08/nasa-shares-the-5-cosmic-ta...

According to the Webb Space Telescope post [1]: "This slice of the vast universe is approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground."

According to the Hubble Site post [2]: "...the Hubble Deep Field image covers a speck of the sky only about the width of a dime 75 feet away"

Edit: So that same page for the Webb image states 2.4 arcmin across, compared to ~3.4 arcmin for the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image [3]

[1] https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/038/01G...

[2] https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/1996/news-1996...

[3] http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/98-the-universe/ga...

Yea, feels like the swirly bokeh of a photo taken using a lens with mechanical vignetting or sagittal astigmatism (colloquially Petzval, but field curvature is both sagittal and tangential).

(like https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:16042014_Bokeh.jpg, https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/52126)

Is the lensing the result of a single large galaxy in the middle that is “closer” or many galaxies?

According to https://www.newscientist.com/article/2328132-james-webb-spac..., "This first image is a region of space called SMACS 0723, which contains what astronomers call a gravitational lens. In areas like this, a massive object relatively close to Earth behaves like a magnifying glass, distorting space and stretching the light of anything behind it." and "The gravitational lens in SMACS 0723 is particularly strong because the nearby object distorting space-time is not one galaxy, but a large cluster of galaxies."

So where are those galaxies? Are they not visible in infrared? Or has light bent so much that those galaxies are not visible?

Some of those arcs seem concentric, so I would assume a mass in that direction. More likely there are multiple masses distorting multiple objects into multiple arcs, but I am not an astronomer and my guess is as good as anyone else's (who's not an astronomer)

From the link in ops post:

“The combined mass of this galaxy cluster acts as a gravitational lens, magnifying much more distant galaxies behind it.”

My car broke down in Delta, Utah in Jan 2020. I was helped by beryllium miners who worked the mines in the area [1]. Beryllium does not expand or contract when heated or cooled, making it ideal for the frame of the James Webb telescope. Coincidentally, I broke down inside a cosmic ray telescope array named with the same last name as mine: The Lon and Mary Watson Cosmic Ray Center [2]

The people in that area are probably celebrating right now, just not with alcohol because they are mostly Mormon. If any of you are on Hacker News reading this, thank you!

[1] https://www.upr.org/utah-news/2022-03-25/beryllium-is-a-crit...

[2] https://www.space.com/36975-telescope-array-site-tour-photo-...

Only a few (maybe 2) people who work on TA are from Delta. Some were there for night shifts for days to a week or two - most of it was to be automated. A few of the researchers were mormon, most are not. Most drank (even if at Curleys).

It’s mostly different astrophysics but still - it’s astrophysics

It would have been cool to meet some researchers and have a chat, but I spent a few days hanging out with the town folk who live in Delta. It's a nice town. I went for pizza in a bar bowling alley. They're not all Mormon and for all I know modern Mormons drink. I counted a Baptist and a Catholic church.

The bar unironically had a poster from the 70's or 80's that no one felt the need to update:

https://imgur.com/a/s6Y6O1J

I was very lucky, because I had just driven on 70 in the Eastern part of Utah where there was no service for about 120 miles (remember that monolith? out there), and I was just about to head out into the Great Basin. In other words, I broke down a couple of miles from the only repair shop in hundreds of thousands of square miles.

yep, not a coincidence there - you have to run atmospheric fluorescence detectors in a dark, unpopulated desert, far from light pollution ideally

That's as far away as I've ever been from light, except Northern Alaska. The lack of human made noise of any kind was also disconcerting there

To anyone looking for information about the infrared color mapping, it's buried on the webbtelescope.org page:

- "In this case, the assigned colors are: Red: F444W Orange: F356W Green: F200W + F277W Blue: F090W + F150W"

https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/038/01G...

You can reference JWST's NIRCam filters here. The longest wavelength this image is 4.4 µm, and the shortest is 0.9 µm (900 nm).

https://jwst-docs.stsci.edu/jwst-near-infrared-camera/nircam... ("NIRCam Filters")

Will they eventually release "raw" images, that is, from each filter at high bit depths? Each exposure if there are multiple? I don't know much but it would be interesting to see how each channel differs, for example, and what that means scientifically.

yes - probably already is, i’d the dataset is actually public now (MAST archive probably). Usually is in FITS format with associated metadata.

PNG is obviously useless for numerical analysis.

Thank you! I was going to ask before I saw this.

This image makes me feel a lot of emotions.

I don't know if its the same with others.

Just wow. The technical achievement is out of this world. Kudos to the whole team.

But the image is just..

Each of those points of light is a galaxy, we are looking at trillions and trillions of galaxies, across the entirety of the visible sky (this image is from an area equivalent to a grain of rice held at an arms length). It is terrifying to even fathom if we are alone or not.

Also, the Hubble Deep Field image took weeks. This took a mere 12.5 hours of exposure.

You are not alone [1]. My emotional response to this image made my spine tingle and was almost tearful. Just trying to appreciate what I'm looking at will take me some time, appreciating all of the hard work and raw science that went into this less so.

As an 11 year old, watching the moon landing, I lived and breathed all things NASA and space related. Now, as I near retirement, I feel just as privileged to view this image in the same way.

[1] I wonder if the work of the JWT will impact Drake's equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

It absolutely will. One of the big advances in the past two decades was the discovery of exoplanets, and at this point we've discovered enough of them that we can get reasonable constraints on their frequency (along with sketchier constraints on Earth-like planets). That alone removed one of the major uncertainties in the Drake equation.

JWST will be able to make far better measurements of exoplanet atmospheres than any other telescope, so this should start to constrain how many Earth-like planets have atmospheres with biological signatures. These constraints will remove the next big uncertainty in the Drake equation.

Absolutely. The resolution of the spectral plots in yesterday's images was amazing.

Me too, and it really saddens me that I am mostly met with shoulder shrugs and rolling eyes by friends and family around, most of them with graduate university degrees too... I was really excited about the images releasing today.

It's inconceivable, looking at it gives me a feeling of derealization. God doesn't begin to explain it. We're some primates on a speck of dust why all of this then? To me it looks like a hall of mirrors. It's like looking at a procedurally generated image in a simulated universe.

This is an extremely mind-boggling image, there is a lot going on here.

So first, one has to keep in mind that this is a composite with images from different wavelengths (exposure time 12.5h), so there could be some artefacts from processing.

Now to the fun part.

It is a deep field image i.e. a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground

The focus is on the galaxy cluster (SMACS 0723) approx. 4.7 billion light years away (incidentally, earth's very age)

The stars causing clear diffraction spikes[0] are way in the foreground ... but the "reddish fuzzy twirled objects" are lensed through the galaxy cluster itself revealing what is way way back (the "redder the farer") --- that's where the NIRCam of the JWST now gives us some really juicy details of galaxies 13 (!) billions light years away, only a couple 100.000 years after the Big Bang. Compare this to the faint Hubble image [1]!

For anyone irritated by the distortions: gravitational lensing can cause a lot of weird patterns e.g. a "Einstein Cross"[2]

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction_spike

[1]https://i.redd.it/9uyhwijeo0b91.gif

[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_Cross

this image makes me curious about something:

imagine a distant galaxy, say ~1billion light years away (not 13 like in this new image).

imagine a civilization in this galaxy.

any information takes ~1billion years to travel between us and them.

but say ten years pass from our frame of reference here on Earth.

in those ten years on Earth, did the civilization ~1billion years away also experience roughly ~10years from their point of view?

I guess what I'm trying to ask is, in the time it took me to write this comment, could there be some part of the universe experiencing a much faster rate of time, relative to us? Did a civilization rise and fall somewhere? Does this question even make sense, or is it one of those things where relativity is so unintuitive that asking a question like this is nonsensical?

Reality is much crazier than that. Some of the distant galaxies are causally disconnected from us: they're receding faster than the speed of light (by one out of the several definitions), and will (probably) continue to do so, so no information can travel between us. No causal interaction is possible. It's as if they were practically no longer a part of this universe -- they can't affect anything here, and nothing here can affect them.

(I'm not certain on this point, but I think some of the high-redshift galaxies we can see in deep field images are now causally disconnected. We're receiving some of their old light, but we can't send anything back anymore -- they've faded out into infinite redshift).

edit: Here's an article about this idea by Ethan Siegel, and its HN discussion thread (thanks 'petilon for helping me remember the author):

https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/the-disappearing-unive... ("The Disappearing Universe")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7896776 (64 comments)

But if we can image it, then there IS an effect.

The photons emitted by that galaxy effect us, here in ours because we can see them.

It's the ones we can't see that are disconnected.

used to have an effect. They may no longer.

Can you provide a link with this info? I’m only a casual follower of this stuff but it seems hard for me to believe

The basic principle is that space itself is expanding—the empty stuff between all those stars, planets, and galaxies. Not only that, but the expansion of space itself? It’s accelerating. And the further away something is, the faster it’s accelerating. Allow this play out over time and with acceleration unbounded, space itself starts to expand faster than the speed of light. And since the speed of light is our universal speed limit… that means the far reaches of universe will forever be out of reach. Eventually our own night sky will go dark (minus the stuff closest to us like the sun, Milky Way, and Andromeda) as more and more objects continue their acceleration away from us.

More at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_the_universe

He’s referring to the cosmic event horizon

“ In an expanding universe, the speed of expansion reaches — and even exceeds — the speed of light, preventing signals from traveling to some regions. A cosmic event horizon is a real event horizon because it affects all kinds of signals, including gravitational waves, which travel at the speed of light.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_horizon

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/05/12/ask-...

Imagine you’re swimming in a magical pool with some friends and the entire pool doubles in size over the course of a second.

Your friend right next to you who was one foot away is now two feet. The absolute distance just grew by 1 foot, a rate of 1 foot/second.

Your friend across the pool who was 10 feet is now 20 feet away. Absolute distance just grew by 10 feet, or a rate of 10 ft/sec.

It's like a balloon. Take two distances when balloon is empty. Let's say furthest points of each other (10cm) and halfway points (5cm) When you inflate the balloon the distance of furthest points increased to 20cm. But the 5cm is 8cm and not 10cm. The same in space. the further you go the faster it expands. The event horizon is the point where the expansion is faster than the speed of light. Any photon emitted will never reach us. The crazy thing is that according to some theories even the space between atoms will be beyond the event horizon.

Here's a link about this idea by Ethan Siegel, and its HN discussion thread (thanks 'petilon for helping me remember the author):

https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/the-disappearing-unive... ("The Disappearing Universe")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7896776 (64 comments)

There are situations where time passes differently like with high speeds and in gravity wells, but except for unusual circumstances, time will pass mostly at the same rate for life on any two planets across the universe. Because on relativistic scales they’ll be in very nearly exactly the same inertial frame.

Like maybe a few nanoseconds over ten minutes difference. One could probably come up with a standard deviation statistic, but whatever it would be would be way below a perceptual difference. (We can measure the difference in the flow of time with a clock on a table compared to another on the floor, but of course that’s way less than could be felt)

> Did a civilization rise and fall somewhere?

Yes. The same civilization! (wait for it)

> or is it one of those things where relativity is so unintuitive that asking a question like this is nonsensical?

The latter. One of the most unintuive aspects of relativity is the relativity of simultaneity. Basically, the order in which events happen in different places in the universe is relative. Imagine event A happening in galaxy A, event B happening in galaxy B, and event C happening in galaxy C.

From the POV of one observer, events might happen in order ABC, while for other they may happen in order BCA.

This doesn't mean that the observers simply see the events in different order because of their distance to them--it means that even when taking distance into account, one event happened before the other.

So yes, a civilization rose while you wrote that comment. It also fell... from the POV of someone else.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity

There's a Star Trek episode addresses this sort of https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Blink_of_an_Eye_(episod...

Also I remember a short story where scientists created a mini universe then find that they can take over conscious beings in this reality, and influence them. So a few minutes to the scientists is thousands of years in this simulation, and they use it to get new technology and such.

Hindus imagined this thousand of years ago.

Uncountable universes(multiverse) are born when Supreme consciousness Vishnu breathes out. Inside each universe God Bharma is born with the responsibly of managing the affair. Brahma lives for his 100 years which is roughly 311 billion years. During this time many mini cycles of creation and dissolution takes place. When Bharma finally dies after completing his 100 years,that particular universe dies with him. After another 311 billion years another Brahma is born again and universe restarts. When supreme god Vishnu finally breathes in, multiverse stop existing and creation end till the time supreme god breathes out again.

That's beautiful. I always wondered if there's some lost knowledge from ye olde ancient past where people knew more (about what we consider scinetific facts now) than we thought they did when they came up with these stories.

Does time move faster the deeper you are in a gravity well?

If a civilization was trying to compete with another in another galaxy, could they coalesce as much matter as they could into a single star, increasing gravity, and relativistically experience more time in their star system than the other civilization?

Yes. You can actually measure this just by the mass difference of a mountain here on Earth, with a sufficiently accurate pair of clocks.

http://www.leapsecond.com/great2016a/index.htm

Yes, it does (from the point of view of observers outside the gravity well), and yes they could. They could also accelerate themselves to relativistic speeds to accomplish the same feat.

I think they’d just need to travel slower through space to experience more time relative to the other civilization. Then that civilization could take more that time to develop a civilization-ending laser or whatever.

Then for gravity, the less gravity that civilization experiences the slower time moves for them relative to their competitor.

So I think the goal would be to send star matter to the other civilization so their time slows down relatively speaking.

I’m no expert, though. Happy to take corrections.

Would that not achieve the opposite effect?

If interstaller thought us anything, the closer you are to a black hole the slower time gets. When they got close to the black hole they only spent a few hours there but lost years compared to our frame of reference.

Time will pass for them very very closely to the same rate it does for us.

But here's something fun: the space between us and them is stretching, so in a billion years when the light arrives at our position, the time between photons will be longer than when they left (so things will appear slower) and the photons will be at a longer wavelength making it more red.

Depends on their velocity relative to Earth. The unintuitive bit of relativity is that you observe the other as experiencing time more slowly - this is the origin of the twin paradox (i.e., shouldn't each twin observe the other as having aged less?) whose resolution comes from the fact that the second twin is in a non-inertial reference frame once he changes directions to return to Earth.

I once asked this question to a scientist and I believe the passage of time seems pretty uniform (in similar gravitational circumstances) The exception is the beginning of the universe where time might have been more fluid for the lack of a better word.

Yes, the two settings (aka "reference frames" in special and general relativity) can experience time at different rates.

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

For comparison, here are some of the best previous images from this area of the sky:

https://archive.stsci.edu/prepds/relics/

https://archive.stsci.edu/prepds/relics/color_images/smacs07...

That's the best original source I've found so far. It's also unclear to me if these images are largely from Spitzer or Hubble or a combination of data from both.

WFC3 and ACS are names of Hubble cameras, so I believe these are just Hubble. (Looking mainly at your second link)

Here's a Hubble vs JWST comparison zoomed into my favorite part: https://twitter.com/sprigland/status/1546633629236748294/pho...

To me, most remarkable is how little different they are.

One is 140 hours, the other 12 hours. So, mainly this calibrates JWST as 10-20x Hubble sensitivity, with noticeably but not radically improved sharpness, but radically less noise. Presumably the actually important results will be the much longer exposures and the redder things Hubble can't see at all, or that would be obscured by noise.

JWST depends very heavily on gravitational lensing and perverse perspective (where things far enough away look bigger because the space they were in grew) to get usefully detailed images. Which is a Good Thing, because we could not have lofted a big enough mirror to get such images directly.

In The Future, when we loft hundreds of flat mirrors maintained in an array hundreds of km across, all this will seem pretty pedestrian. But those will have to be out by Neptune so the whole thing can be kept cold enough to be useful. Powering it will be a tricky affair: it will probably need beamed microwave power from a correspondingly large solar concentrator, or maybe D-3He FRC reactor if that can be got working. Then, getting the data home will be a project of its own.

In the more distant future, civilization will have shifted major operations and population out there to take advantage of access to the thermodynamically most irreducible resource, cold. That probably cannot happen until after p-11B fusion is mastered. (To be clear: people won't move out there, much; rather, population out there will outgrow Earth's.)

You don't think this is radically increased sharpness? Look at the orange ones on the right: https://twitter.com/sprigland/status/1546633787030704129

There is much less speckle noise in the JWST image, but the relative sizes of light patches roughly match.

The lack of speckle noise is what will be important, because the dim stuff that doesn't show here is what will turn up in longer exposures, and not be obscured by it.

> In The Future, when we loft hundreds of flat mirrors maintained in an array hundreds of km across, all this will seem pretty pedestrian.

Or we use the Sun as a gravitational lens.

What will we glean from your Neptune array that would justify the massive cost? Won’t it just look like this but sharper images of galaxies and earlier and earlier in time? What are we trying to discover then? Surely almost everything about the universe that we can know from our location will be known then. Your Neptune array sounds like one of those bird watchers with the huge telephoto lens just hoping to capture a great shot of yet another bird the world has seen millions of times.

“All science is either physics or stamp collecting.”

Ultralarge telescopes would let you directly image surface features of exoplanets.

There's plenty of stuff we'd like to look at outside our solar system. We could send interstellar probes to local systems, but sending probes to stars thousands of light years away is still going to be pretty tough, even with far future technology.

You could have said the same about JWST a hundred years ago. Many would have, and would have been as wrong.

The hypothetical question to a hypothetical situation deserves a hypothetical answer.

There would be no massive cost. It would be a project affordable by the curious humans/robots/organizations of The Future. Automation will construction and manage the array, and the civilization building such a structure will be post-scarcity to some extent.

At a certain size it becomes possible to directly image exoplanets in enough detail to tell us what the weather looks like, atmospheric composition, perhaps even images of extraterrestrial cities.

Let's say the universe is 14 billion years old and the galaxies in this image are 13 billion years old. The largest the universe could have been at the time is 2 billion light-years across if the universe expanded at the speed of light after the Big Bang. However, if we pointed the Webb in the exact opposite direction we would see galaxies that are 26 billion light years away from those in this image. How is this possible if the galaxy could have only been 2 billion light years across 13 billion years ago?

Also, if the Milky Way galaxy was somewhere within the 2 billion light year diameter sphere of the universe at that time (it wasn't because it isn't that old), the light from this image should have hit us a long time ago.

Get ready for this answer because it is wild: There universe grew way, way faster than the speed of light.

> At this point of the very early universe, the metric that defines distance within space suddenly and very rapidly changed in scale, leaving the early universe at least 10^78 times its previous volume (and possibly much more). This is equivalent to a linear increase of at least 10^26 times in every spatial dimension—equivalent to an object 1 nanometre (10−9 m, about half the width of a molecule of DNA) in length, expanding to one approximately 10.6 light-years (100 trillion kilometres) long in a tiny fraction of a second. This change is known as inflation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe

Objects within space can't move faster than light. But space itself can stretch fast enough that they objects within the universe are having the distance between them grow faster than the speed of light.

Inflation was way before the time seen in this image.

But it still answers the question asked in the parent comment.

> The largest the universe could have been at the time is 2 billion light-years across if the universe expanded at the speed of light after the Big Bang.

That is the first mistake in your train of thought, the universe doesn't expand "at the speed of light", it is not a ball expanding outwards with an outer shell expanding at a measurable speed.

Instead it expands everywhere all at once, all distances are being stretched. And this streatching doesn't have a "speed" (m/s), there is nothing traveling, so it is not bound by the speed of light. Instead it has a rate of expansion (m/m/s) as in how much each meter will grow in a second.

Sorry, I'm not an expert so I don't know how to explain properly.

In other words, the speed of light is irrelevant. It (or relativity) doesn't dictate at all a limit on the relative speeds of two objects. This much is obvious if you consider two objects moving in oppositive directions at 51% the speed of light. Certainly valid, even though combined their relative speed from each other is >c

You can extrapolate the same to the expansion of the universe, I think, but I may be simplifying too much.

> two objects moving in oppositive directions at 51% the speed of light

> combined their relative speed from each other is >c

We've got to be very precise with the language here. That's not accurate as stated, even though I know what you mean. The relative speed of one of these objects from the other one is not greater than c. You cannot directly add relativistic velocities without making adjustments for time dilation. Adding .51 + .51 to get 1.02 is not how the math works out.

If I am sitting in the middle, observing both objects, then I see the distance between them increasing at greater than the speed of light. But that concept should not be called "relative velocity" of one object with respect to the other. That's different.

No observer can witness an object receding at or above the speed of light. At that point the redshift would completely suppresses the information from arriving.

Not to say there is no such a boundary, it just might not be what intuition would tell us like a baloon, a sphere or similar. Geometry of universe might be a torus, but also not really. Shit gets weird when you start reading research, and it takes a lot of effort to even start reading with comprehension there.

I like this.

My 'bad' mental model is: In the beginning there was an infinite amount of space and somewhere within that space the Big Bang happened. The universe is all the matter and energy produced by the Big Bang and that universe is expanding at a maximum speed of C through the infinite amount of space.

But you are saying, I think, that before the Big Bang there was no space. The Big Bang produced all the matter, energy, and space itself. And space is expanding, NOT just the matter and energy expanding through the infinite pre-existing space that I imagined.

I still have a very hard time imagining 'no space' before the Big Bang and the concept of space being something besides 'nothing'. Because if space is expanding it must be something more than nothing.

it's not known whether the Big Bang was the beginning of space or time. there's one theory (eternal inflation) that our universe fell out of a continuous Big Bang when a false vacuum collapsed. all the pieces of that field then became particles, since they're high energy compared to the newly-dropped floor of our spacetime.

the kind of expansion happening between galaxies is a different kind of inflation.

it's even more mind-blowing though, because it would imply that the 10^-32 second inflation of our universe from a grain of sand to only 1000x smaller than it is now is just... the steady state, outside our microscopic bubble of observable reality.

The big bang didn't expand from a single point explosion.

The big bang happened literally everywhere in the universe.

The size of the universe both now and at essentially the time of the big bang (or some infinitesimal time after whatever happened at the exact singularity) was infinite.

The energy-density though was much higher, and the universe has stretched so that distant points in the universe were much closer together back then.

The fact that we see galaxies traveling away from us very quickly at high redshift is due to the expansion of space. Those galaxies are going to be stationary on average when measured locally.

It is like you are standing next to someone but you both see each other moving away from you because something is inserting more and more rulers between you.

The insertion of the rulers in that picture is also how the energy density drops over time because there's more and more space between all the stuff, so the density drops, and the temperature drops.

But the big bang happened here 13.7 billion years ago or so, and the big bang also happened 13 billion light years away out there, roughly 700 million years before that light left (ish).

Calling it a "bang" is really the wrong word to use. Its really the big adiabatic cooling where the size of the container just keeps on getting bigger.

And that is probably not the whole picture since there's also inflation in the early Universe to talk about when the Higgs mechanism(s) broke and released a pile of energy and blew the universe up very quickly.

> And that is probably not the whole picture since there's also inflation in the early Universe to talk about when the Higgs mechanism(s) broke and released a pile of energy and blew the universe up very quickly.

1. Is inflation anything more than a "just so" story? That is, is there any evidence besides the overall smoothness of the universe? (Without such evidence, it seems to me that inflation is "the universe is smoother than we expect, so it must have happened this way.)

2. Can you ELI20 why the Higgs broke (I presume you mean symmetry breaking), and why that would release a bunch of energy?

3. The Higgs breaking should release energy in space-time, but inflation was an expansion of space-time. Why should an energy release drive that?

I wrote an undergrad paper on this decades ago now so I'm not sure I can explain that very well any more.

We know the Higgs exists now so electroweak symmetry breaking is on pretty good terms. That means at a high enough energy the W and Z bosons will lose their mass and kind of reverse fuse with the Higgs and photon and you'll get SU(2) Yang-Mills theory. In order to get our universe with broken SU(2)xU(1) symmetry and a massive Higgs and W, Z bosons then you really do need the symmetry breaking mechanism.

I cannot explain why that dumps energy into space-time and why that in particular causes the inflation and expansion of the Universe. I think its dependent upon the exact shape of the Higgs "sombrero" potential and we don't know exactly what that looks like. To have a Higgs mechanism breaking the electroweak symmetry without dumping energy into space time though I think is considered not likely. Once you dump the energy from the Higgs mechanism into space-time I think you're fairly guaranteed to get an inflating universe, but here is where I'm just entirely trusting what I've read in words, with no personal connection to math at all (although I do trust that the math exists for this)

Then on the flip side you can use inflation to explain the large scale mass structure in the universe and the globby strands of matter become quantum fluctuations in the pre-inflation universe. Of course I think they're still off by orders and orders of magnitude between theory and reality still(?) but that does lend some plausibility to it all.

The electroweak symmetry breaking is on much more firm ground since we can point at the Higgs particle and it doesn't make a lot of sense except as a broken symmetry. Since we can produce lots and lots of Higgs particles in the LHC now it means that the plausibility of at least some kind of simple inflationary cosmology is pretty high.

There is a real possibility that there are multiple different regions of the universe (and since the universe is presumably infinite that means presumably infinite numbers of regions) where the Higgs potential broke differently and physics is very different there. We find ourselves in a pretty uniform area of the universe, though, which is probably pretty good, and which is likely also explained by inflation. That might be wrong, but at least it needs to be considered seriously. And someone would need to come up with an explanation of why the infinite Universe would freeze uniformly to having exactly one way of breaking the primordial Yang-Mills symmetry across all of it -- it seems more plausible there would be different regions with fundamentally different electroweak symmetry. We find ourselves in one of the regions conducive to complex life because you need things like stellar nucleosynthesis to have anything interesting to talk about. That is all more of a philosophical story though -- except that we know there was one symmetry breaking and it just seems weirder to have only one and not N.

If these questions interest you, I’d recommend the book “The End of Everything” by Katie Mack. Ostensibly it’s about the end of the universe but to explain the various possibilities she has to first explain the kind of things you’re talking about.

The Milky Way galaxy really is that old. There are at least millions of stars (red dwarfs) in the Milky Way, probably most with planets, fully that old. Some of those could easily be covered with life nearly that old. And, probably way more black holes that old, many (co-)orbiting those red dwarfs.

That is not to say our galaxy had its present form, then; a bunch of galaxies merged to make ... well, what we are in. (Ownership would be wrong to claim.)

It is really just our own sun that is new. Ish.

That many billions of years is time for a very great deal of evolution. But, also of exposure to such existential risks as nearby supernovas and magnetar starquakes that could sterilize a whole planet down to the mantle. A galaxy is a dangerous place even without alien invasions. So, lots of Pompeiis covering the full spectrum of stages. But given time, life could arise again, wholly new, after.

Is this because space is expanding? 68 km per second per megaparsec, see https://phys.org/news/2015-02-fast-universe.html, so the observable universe is more light years big than its age.

The universe can expand faster than the speed of light because of the expansion of space. The rule "nothing can go faster than light" is more situational than it's usually presented; I believe the true rule only means that objects that meet each other can't have a speed difference more than lightspeed, but for objects that are far apart, it's possible for them to see the distance between each other grow as if they were moving apart faster than light because of the expansion of space between them.

Prepare to have your mind blown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_the_universe

TLDR: expansion of the universe doesn't care about the speed of light and the universe is believed to have inflated very fast in its early moments

> 13 billion years old

> 26 billion light years away

You are comparing distance to time.

Yes, because the speed of light relates them. Distance and time are interchangable if you know the speed as well, and especially if you use units where the conversion constant is 1 (ly/y)

Unfortunately, times don’t add like that under relativity

It's impossible for me not to wonder how many species of life are in this photo, intelligent or otherwise, and things we can't even begin to imagine. The hostile environments, the ones blossoming with beautiful calm, and the frightening distance between everything in the photo where basically nothing exists, I'm having trouble even processing what I'm looking at here, it's just so... vast.

I'm excited to see what the other photos look like but even more, for what the next 10+ years of space photography might reveal.

If I could wish for one thing, it'd be some vast improvement in black hole photography. While I appreciate the recent achievements in even being able to capture a black hole on film, I imagine a photo as life-like as the simulated black hole in Interstellar would make it hard to not get emotional seeing such an incomprehensibly powerful object in great detail.

Looking at this photo, I mean it is beautiful, but we can’t wrap our head around the maddening violence of space. It’s so hostile to life, and earth has us biased towards a peaceful outlook, but space is maddeningly violent and inhospitable. Imagine approaching a black hole and being spaghettified a great distance across where you have to endure many years of physical & mental torture before being destroyed at the event horizon?!

> Imagine approaching a black hole and being spaghettified a light year across where you have to endure a thousand years of physical torture before being destroyed at the event horizon?!

This would only happen for very small blackholes, and even then from your point of view time would act normally.

Is there any evidence for time dilation though? My 1000 years number is a rough guess, and it could be shorter or even longer than that. I was thinking since physics breaks down that you would have to endure being spaghettified whilst still being able to feel and have nerves intact and thinking capacity.

Even if your brain is perceiving time normally, even if you’re not experiencing enough acceleration to be crushed yet, I really don’t want to think about the effects of a severe time-dilation gradient on the rest of the body.

According to this video, the spaghettification doesn't happen until the last few seconds/minutes, when you're close to the singularity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rTv9wvvat8

This actually just gave me a super dark thought, I do wonder if any "life" has experienced being pulled into a black hole over the last few billion years.

Depends on your solution to the Drake equation. But unless you think life is universally unique to earth, I’d say it’s quite likely. The universe is big, if there’s any more life, there’s a lot of it, and models predict there are lots of black holes out there in every galaxy.

Yeah I mean time breaks down and you experience everything in slow motion and are stuck circling a black hole for what seems like an eternity. It’s unlikely to happen to anyone here on Earth, but you are right, there’s the likelihood of other life getting stuck in these things.

Assuming that a reasonable fraction of the planets have life, and then some non-vanishingly small number have intelligent life, this photo contains millions or even billions of planets with intelligence.

The Star Trek vision of the future is a handful of contacted races, all very distinct.

This.. this is nearly a continuum of possibility. Political systems? This image has them all, and every intermediate, outlier, and axis explored. Warfaring? There are more than likely a million battles being fought in this image, right "now". A trillion-trillion soldiers and weapons systems of every kind, and every kind in between. Flying tanks. Hover artillery. Underwater helicopters. Nanobots. Microbots. In-between bots. Every kind of bot.

The numbers are just... unimaginable. You could chart every aspect of these civilizations with smooth graphs, much like the Stellar classification chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_classification

Don't know why, but feeling a bit emotional about the image. Besides this first one, whole set will be released in 3 hours:

https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/countdown.html

It would be nice to see comparison to the Herschel space observatory images from the same location.

https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Hersch...

Here’s a Hubble comparison: https://twitter.com/erinbiba/status/1546624746598563840

   Hubble    4.0 m2 (43 sq ft)
   Herschel  9.6 m2 (103 sq ft)
   JWST     25.4 m2 (273 sq ft)

Hubble had ~40% of the Herschel's collecting area and Herchel had 40% of the JWST's collecting area.

(Herschel was located in the same L2 point as JWST).

Incredible photo from a scientific perspective. The team must be ecstatic that everything went to plan so far.

Truthfully I don’t think a random member of the public would be impressed by this photo. I’m surprised that they led with this during their biggest moment of public reach.

Can they remove the diffraction artifacts by rotating and re-acquiring, then doing some kind of diff/averaging? They are very apparent and distracting.

They might clean it up further in the future when they have more time. For the science they care more about the spectroscopy anyway.

I was lucky enough to get to tour the clean room where they were fabricating the microshutter array at Goddard many years ago. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures, since this was before smart phones. I think that really helps contextualize just how long the development process of something like this is. And maybe what it could be capable of if it was built with today's technology.

It would be really nice if they were to create a continual satellite telescope program where they launched an updated version every five years or so.

Do whatever iterations of technology fit within that time window, have a few in progress to keep up the cadence.

Images like this remind how irrelevant we are in the cosmos. The rest of the universe won't even notice when we are gone.

Man, wouldn't it suck if it turned out the only place in that vastness that supported sentient life was Earth and we fucked it up?

It wouldn’t, because then there wouldn’t be anyone who it would suck for.

It would be sucking in a metaphorical vacuum.

Ugh. Apologies :)

It could suck plenty for our descendants, while any remained.

Definitely. But it won't matter.

So much more important that we make the best of the time we have, for each other, while we can make a difference for ourselves.

Yes, but we need to change how we treat each other.

I for once don't care about Nato or trading oil in USD, but nevertheless the US government thinks it has the right to make everybodys life miserable if people don't care enough about those things. Same goes for the trade war between China and the US. Nobody except some corporations and greedy politicians really care.

This shit needs to end. It is literally killing us all. And we must stop buying and producing crap we don't really need.

This is an emergent quality of ourselves (or a life) and not a coincidence or few personal fads. It will continue to be until we re-engineer ourselves and/or create a substituting species.

This makes me imagine a little part of the Mandelbrot set saying it is irrelevant because it's such a small part of the whole. But in truth, the Mandelbrot set is not the Mandelbrot set without every part of it (the math would be off). We are the universe. As Alan Watts said: "an apple tree apples, and the universe peoples".

You don't know that. Sure there's lots of worlds there and even more space between them, but size and scale isn't everything. Meaning may be unevenly distributed. Universe could be fractal. Those could be minor variations of the same world, rather than many different ones. They could have laws of physics distinct from ours for all we know.

What an incredible image and achievement for countless people who worked on this over the years. It’s impossible not to sit and wonder what life might be like in any of these galaxies.

Something to drive home how impressive this is - "If you held a grain of sand up to the sky at arm’s length, that tiny speck is the size of Webb’s view in this image."

And in that view there are thousands of galaxyes each with billions of stars orbiting around. I so badly wish i had the money and time to spend it all on exploring the universe.

All the money and time in the world won’t even get you close to our closest neighboring star, which is literally a billion times closer to us than what we see in this picture

I’d settle for a colony on europa or a planet wide city on mars - no need to terraform it, just seal the surface and build a vast controlled environment.

I know similar calculations were done for Hubble's deep field, but we need to do it again here: count the number of galaxies in this photo, then multiply it by the area of the sky divided by the area of this image (I think it's 2.4 arc minute across?)

Webb's view of the universe? And how do we know :-/

With all disagreements I see in this community, space has never been one of them. This is a beautiful image. Kudos NASA.

It’s somehow more grounding than every other human concern, if only for the fact that we have no ability to affect it even one iota (beyond our solar system). The greatest light show in all existence.

This is true, except for dark matter and dark energy debates :)

"From our home on the Earth, we look out into the distances and strive to imagine the sort of world into which we are born. Today we have reached far out into space. Our immediate neighborhood we know rather intimately. But with increasing distance our knowledge fades, and fades rapidly, until at the last dim horizon we search among ghostly errors of observations for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial. The search will continue. The urge is older than history. It is not satisfied and it will not be suppressed." -- Edwin Hubble

I am curious. What happens if they aim this telescope at some of the closer exo planets? Would we get images with atmospheres and such? Excuse the excitement, but that would be so cool!

The planets will still just be star-like bright dots, but we will get some useful new spectral data, and be able to image much smaller and more distant ones. https://webb.nasa.gov/content/science/origins.html

> Webb will also carry coronagraphs to enable direct imaging of exoplanets near bright stars. The image of an exoplanet would just be a spot, not a grand panorama, but by studying that spot, we can learn a great deal about it. That includes its color, differences between winter and summer, vegetation, rotation, weather...How is this done? The answer again is spectroscopy.

genuinely curious if the advancements of AI image generation and editing tools can assist with using this data to produce some approaching realism.

Not with this generation of telescopes. We’re talking about a few pixels worth of data.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HR_8799_Orbiting_Exo...

The size difference between our galaxy and our planet is ~14 orders of magnitude. For a planet to have the same dimensions as in the picture, it must be proportionally closer. That means if these galaxies from the image are 1e10..1e11 light years away (whether you guess to ignore the expansion or not), a planet must be 1e-3..1e-4 light years away, which barely covers the distance to Pluto.

Of course the above doesn’t account for lensing and who knows what else, but you get the idea. (If my math is correct)

It seems to be a common misconception that JWST will give us the best angular resolution of any existing telescope. However that is not the case. JWST was designed for lower wavelengths, and due to physics reasons you get a lower angular resolution for a given reflector diameter, as compared to higher wavelengths.

So even though the JWST is a larger scope, Hubble's visible wavelength photos are higher resolution than JWST's longer wavelength photos.

You need to mask out the bright star with a coronagraph and then the planet needs to be big/bright enough. Even then you will just see a dot as this ESO telescope image shows. However using spectroscopy they can deduce the composition of the planet atmosphere.

https://www.eso.org/public/images/potw1846a/

I don't think so, I think planets are just too small and far away to be much more than points of light (or shadows crossing in front of stars).

In a lot of cases, we infer the presence of planets by making very precise measurements of relative velocities of stars (using red/blue shift of light) and making note of periodic wobbles that indicate that its position is being affected by planets.

To add to what the others said, I think it was mentioned previously that one of the things being released tomorrow is spectra of an exoplanet's atmosphere.

Wow, clearest example of gravitational lensing I've ever seen.

As someone with formerly a connection to the astronomy world, I am certainly glad to see attention on this achievement.

But I also know that the science + research community should also be grateful for the general public's complete lack of memory or understanding of the science, that keeps them coming back and fawning over press releases like this and in a way keeps the field funded. (The cynic in me says thank the lord for the new people each year who get to rediscover the beauty of old images for the first time.)

For all they know, the image released today could've been a snapshot from WFPC2 HDF 20 years ago or ACS UDF from 10 years ago -- the images look basically the same to the outsider's eye! Very little about the image itself visually tells you that it's in the IR. Much like some medical research "breakthrough" that gets touted that could've been the same announcement from 20 years ago, no lay person really knows the difference.

Still, sincere congratulations on decades of waiting.

edit: No, I am not saying that the images are a repost... obviously. Read my message more carefully.

Wrong all over.

Check the other comments, they are def not the same.

The condescending and cynical tone also destroys any inquisitiveness. "Lay" people can absolutely tell the difference.

You're taking me a little too literally, I'm not saying that the public is being duped. Of course this is a new image from JWST. And this comment isn't really for general public consumption or to deflate the general public's enthusiasm for the achievement.

I'm just saying that the field benefits from new discoveries that seem just like old discoveries being embraced by the general public even though they won't really know the full difference or underlying science. I think every field has this to some extent.

So, ok, here you go -- I will take you up on your challenge. Which one of these is from the UDF 15 years ago, and which is from today's announcement?

https://imgur.com/a/kga5CxY

https://imgur.com/a/Wf1vHio

You're taking all the context out of the two pictures.

These pictures are not viewed in isolation. This post is full of comments of people asking questions about things like the gravitational lensing. And the picture will then end up in videos like these https://youtu.be/oAVjF_7ensg which gather millions of views and which help educate people on what the picture means and why it's significant.

I'm going to guess the first is Webb due to the mirror pattern (but that's cheating and your larger point stands).

I'm sure someone could check the MAST archives (https://archive.stsci.edu/) of all historical Hubble pictures to see if they match up.

"Webb’s image covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground"

I had absolutely no idea that these images we see of the universe / galaxy were such a small sliver of the vast possibility. That is incredible. Does anybody know:

1. What is the field of vision on this image, and

2. what is the widest field of vision image that we have captured of the universe?

I found the image surprisingly empty considering this is a 2D projection of an enormous 3D volume. The size of a grain of sand from arms length but size of hundreds of galaxies at the far end.

How about 1.4 Gigapixel image of the galaxy? The new photos are stunning. Let's Enhance's AI made them super high res for you to enjoy the clearest view of the Universe.

Download: 80MP/140MB https://drive.google.com/file/d/150VhXVEfYXmr70LrrZxQ50pU0u5...

1.4GP/2.5GB (note: not every image viewer can handle a file this big) https://drive.google.com/file/d/14x__QDUmrIvLnlxoSOksu3mgpeX...

Most of the curving stretched, I'm assuming gravitational-distorted, galaxies in that photograph seem to have a similar focal point for their curve. Surely that is not a coincidence. Is the body in the center of the photograph gravitationally distorting the light from the further objects all the way out to the edge of the photograph?

They seem to be really dancing around the fact of whether or not this is greater angular resolution than the Hubble ultra-deep field with qualifiers like "greater than Hubble in infrared" or talking about how fast it was. Does this image resolve smaller details than the ultra deep field or not?

Hubble is able to take higher resolution (smaller angular resolution) pictures in it's optimum wavelengths. Even though JWST has a larger light bucket, the photons its capturing are longer wavelength so the end result is a lower resolution.

You asked in another comment "Are the finest details in this picture finer than the finest details in the Hubble ultra-deep field?".

In a sense, yes since the finest details in this photo are of a wavelength that Hubble isn't sensitive too, so they are visible here but do not show up in an equivalent Hubble shot.

It is complicated and wavelength dependent. In near infrared, Hubble and JWST have about the same resolution. As the frequency moves further into infrared, JWST is better than Hubble. The other things that affect how clear an image is are “point spread function” - how much light gets scattered. And how steady the telescope can be held on one spot. Both of these capabilities are better for JWST than Hubble.

Again the evasive language. I'm not talking about the technical specs, I'm talking this dang picture. This one. Are the finest details in this picture finer than the finest details in the Hubble ultra-deep field?

Are “the finest details” of an X-ray of your wrist finer than a screen grab from a camera phone video of your wrist?

This picture is not the actual image data from JWST, but rather an interpretation of infrared data.

If you're only asking about the details in this picture, my understanding is that JWST is better though not by orders of magnitude.

However the actual answer is that the two telescopes are not easily comparable in this fashion.

Aren’t the rays of lights that makes a star pattern in the images an artifact of how JWST is capturing the light? Shouldn’t that be scrubbed and removed?

Also, why do so many galaxies looks “stretched” as if there was motion blur?

EDIT: why the downvotes? I don’t understand. I’m just asking some basic space / telescope questions.

> Aren’t the rays of lights that makes a star pattern in the images an artifact of how JWST is capturing the light?

I believe so, yes.

> Shouldn’t that be scrubbed and removed?

Not sure. They may have different levels of processing or different entire processes based in what properties of the image they're after maybe? It also seems possible that any processing to remove those would lose information.

> Also, why do so many galaxies looks “stretched” as if there was motion blur?

I believe that's the gravitational lensing. We're looking at _very_ far away things, and slightly less far away, for this one, (and just out of frame) there's a galaxy cluster that's magnifying the image and distorting it a bit.

Gravitational lensing. It's also visible in the Hubble images of the same region if you look elsewhere in this thread.

Let's assume space is curved in a way that it only appears vast and it's an irregular curvature. How would you be able to demonstrate if an object in a photograph is another cycle around the curvature?

For instance, you could be seeing an already observed object at a different incoming angle and thus a trivial comparison would be defeated

I'd think if this question is answerable you could also perhaps demonstrate there are no cycles or repetitions, even irregular ones.

I don't know though, anyone that knows things care to opine? I'm assuming this is theoretically arguable, such as a proof by contradiction or something.

We can do things to measure the curvature of the universe, everything so far points to complete flatness so if there is curvature and the universe is closed, the radius is much much larger than the observable universe as to make it appear “locally” flat, where “local” is something like 100 billion light years.

How did the measure the curvature of the universe?

By looking at the remnant of the big bang -- measuring the power spectrum of the remaining cosmic microwave background energy, across large angles of sky.

I am wondering if the galaxies that look extruded are actually stretched like that from some crazy force or black hole or something, or if the light is distorted.

It's gravitational lensing from the cluster of galaxies around the center of the image. Source: https://twitter.com/ProfBrianCox/status/1546722072499462147

The directions of the spiral galaxies seem to align tangential to the middle of the photo. Is that just an artifact of the image, or is there a reason behind it?

The ones that are obviously spirals appear tangential, but that's more or less saying the same thing. If they weren't tangential they wouldn't be ovious spirals.

You can find spirals that are more side-on, and galaxies that are completely side-on you can't tell one way or the other.

[edit] Unless you're referring to the gravity lensing effect, in which case the lensing smear is tangential to to the lensing cluster of galaxies, due to how lensing works.

Ah, OK thanks... Now I see what gravity lensing means!

What an incredible achievement for our civilization.

Can someone with some astronomy knowledge explain why the center of the images has a bunch of concentric-ish smudges? What does it mean?

Gravitational lensing

So, are the smudges' light coming from behind the objects in the center?

Yes, they are being warped and magnified by the central cluster of galaxies.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32063057

The smudges are proof that Einstein was correct

It seems almost impossible to believe there appears to be very little out there in terms of alien signals. Demis Hassabis’ argument that we would see lots of signals by now if other life had reached human intelligence levels seems persuasive to me. Almost seems more terrifying if we eventually explore the universe to find nothing else there…

Inspired tonight by this photo, I made this little tribute piece on my synthesizer: Webb Awakens https://drive.google.com/file/d/14mdhZ8yPdKarB8GHbWXToY9v_03...

The story behind the original capture by the Hubble is really incredible. This is kind of cool but I don't think JWT will have the same "damn this changes our entire perspective about the universe" potential.

That depends on what kind of exoplanet atmospheres we find out there:

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/nasa-s-webb-will-s...

James Webb Space Telescope White House Briefing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32062139 - July 2022 (82 comments)

So beautiful!

So many questions to be asked and natural mysteries to be probed by man made in the image and likeness of God.

May such research give glory to Him who made the Pleiades and Orion (Amos 5:8), for His greater glory and the salvation of souls.

What is this "star" effect on som of the prominent stars? Why is it only on some of the light sources? What causes it in a lense in general and why is it not correct for in JWST?

Thanks!

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

With this resolution, I’m wondering if we could see some artificial structures made by Type 3 civilizations, or some side effects of them. Or maybe we will feel even more lonely.

What are the odds that such an image (Dyson sphere for example) would actually be released? It's not like we have a raw feed from the Webb. On the other hand, suppressing it doesn't make much sense either, since the age of such an object would only indicate that something was, rather than is.

Maybe if we zoom in closely on a shiney object we will be able to see into the past...

Press conference of unveiling of images is 20 minutes away

https://youtu.be/nmMRMIE3MGw

This ain't new it's just the background image of beloved pc game "master of orion II" :)

Superb! I just saw this on Sky News and came here first, I just knew the source was going to be around.

All that vastness, those infinite planets. And we just keep f*.. up the only known one with life.

It's a bit smudgy. Maybe they should try to clean the lens?

I really hate that you can see artifacts from the hex mirrors.

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

Hubble had diffractions spikes too, four of them from the struts holding the secondary mirror.

They aren't from the mirrors; they're from the struts.

They're from the mirrors, just one is from the struts.

This infographic does a nice job showing which are from the struts and which from the mirrors: https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/01G529MX46J7...

Of course, the JWST without its struts and its mirrors wouldn't be much of a telescope! So the diffraction spikes are a part of doing business and also have the helpful side effect of allowing us to quickly know which objects are stars vs galaxies, since only the former have the really prominent spikes.

False.

Three struts, but because of light diffraction, six spikes.

There are much smaller diffraction effects which are in part due to the mirrors, but these are far smaller and not immediately evident. Both apply largely to foreground point sources, which is to say, relatively nearby stars. Distant objects with an appreciable size don't produce diffraction spikes.

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

(Via: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32063220)

They are distracting. Will they be able to dim the "lens-flares" computationally?

Lens flare is the wrong term but yes they do correct for them.

Welp, there’s a sure fire way to bring me to tears.

What can scientists learn from this image?

is the glare real? (and why is it hexagonal). Are the smudges due to gravitational lensing or motion?

>is the glare real? (and why is it hexagonal).

The hexagonal star pattern is an artifact of the struts holding the secondary mirror.

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

So many lensing effects!!

What a weirdly botched release. 90 min delay with nothing more than a title screen and a terrible repeating music track. (When it was at least an opportunity to display material related to the project for those stopping in due to media coverage). A labyrinth of a website with interlinking and crosslinking throughout. Web links that come up blank. And an unprepared accompanying statement for the image given off the cuff by the director. Weird press conference -- 'who is this for?'

All around, just strange and poorly executed from a communications/media standpoint. Completely inexcusable for an organization like this.

Meh...yeah it was a bit disorganized. I think it's possible to see that as less of a big deal. Honestly, I kind of appreciated the informality of it. Realistically, scientific announcements don't have as much mind share as earthbound current affairs. I think that's unfortunate, but it's also the reality of things. The effort put into the event probably lined up with those priorities.

Seems to me like people are overly sensitive about missteps like this nowadays; too quick to lob criticism.

The organization was part of it. The bigger concern was probably the content that was not fit for the medium -- that's a failure in advance. Having a camera feed of a screen with smaller screens within it with unreadable text captions for seemingly important people ...is not appropriate. This type of content is so perfect for modern media distribution (instagram, youtube, twitter, tiktok) but those channels aren't properly used (or they're ignored altogether). It just seems like such a missed opportunity for an incredible public science communications event. (TBH, it's much more likely that this was botched by the WhiteHouse rather than NASA -- so there's hope that tomorrow's event will be a bit more useful on the science/public/comms front).

Reminds me of Arianespace's launch streams compared to pretty much everyone else's. All of new space tries to make their streams interesting and modern without shifting the focus from the thing that matters (the rocket), while Arianespace shows a bunch of people talking with a tiny view of the rocket people actually care about seeing. Lately even ULA has pretty cool footage to show afterwards.

Feels like this is just the usual case of the 'old guard' being completely out of touch.

Who is flagging this extremely valid criticism of this photo release circus? I totally agree with this sentiment and it is something that science teams will have to reflect on for future communications. This was absolutely terrible.

interestica 5 minutes ago [flagged] [dead] | prev [–]

From the HN guidelines:

> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

This was not the first awkward science press event and it won’t be the last. It’s annoying but that is not noteworthy; life is full of annoyances. A new deep image from a new space telescope is what is really noteworthy.

Also from a practical perspective, complaining here won’t reach the people you actually want to influence. NASA staff are publicly available; if you want to complain, look up their email addresses and write to them directly. You might even get a reply!

Flagging because overly-harsh armchair criticism towards a piece of the world's most advanced precision engineering operating in deep space that isn't really even fully operational yet. President of the world's most powerful country at least coming out to talk about it. Only really one image to release because said device is brand spanking new. What exactly do you want? Kanye West and a load of confetti?

In fairness, some of the criticism isn't armchair: some of us work in science, may know what good science communication can look like, and can then be fairly critical of what is a wonderful opportunity for effective communication with a large audience being mishandled. These opportunities do not come every day, so it's important to make the most of them.

I imagine the NASA conference tomorrow may give more clarity, e.g. perhaps today's announcement was a last-minute press op that wasn't sufficiently planned? Maybe the full NASA briefing will be better.

With that said, I think it's fair to keep this discussion separate so as not to overshadow the very real and tremendous accomplishment we're witnessing today. Obviously the manner of the announcement is insignificant compared to the result itself, and I hope everyone involved is very rightly proud.

> Obviously the manner of the announcement is insignificant compared to the result itself

Not really, I'd argue it's just as important.

Without solid PR for current projects, future projects get less funding.

The telescope is great. The presentation was a joke. I waited an hour, went to the kitchen for a couple minutes, came back to find it had just ended and couldn't be replayed. Found a direct link to the science page myself.

Ever wonder why lots of people don't give a hoot about science funding? This is why, you promise them something important and exceptional and then deliver a low quality product. Again, I refer to the streaming event, not the telescope/science team.

And yet, oh look, the images online for instant access, forever, without having to leave the kitchen.

> Who is flagging this extremely valid criticism of this photo release circus?

People who are more interested in the photo and the technology that produced it than public communications, would be my guess.

I just found how bad it was to be utterly strange and unexpected:

No updates via their channels on the delay. Their linked live stream had no mention of delay and just displayed general unrelated content (about the ISS). In situ comments were also turned off so there was no way to corroborate with others that there was a delay or if one was even in the right space for the release. Even when eventually ready to go live, they made no update -- those that got to see from the beginning were those that happened to be keeping the feed open for the 90mins.

In the press conference, it was a screen of a screen displayed within a screen. When the 3 highlighted members were featured, their names were thus too small to be seen on the feed.

Sounds a lot more fun to just talk about the picture and the science.

Criticism can be both valid and entirely irrelevant at the same time. People are just protecting the S/N ratio.

The same people who flagged me for predicting the public speaking would be as terrible as it turned out to be and that they needed to find better people to handle this. This was just embarrassing, especially considering what's been done in the past.

A few days ago I saw a tweet (because Twitter shows me "Popular" crap all the time) from some "science influencer" that said something like "The new pictures from the Webb telescope are bringing scientists to tears!".

I get that's how they earn their bread but from my point of view it comes off as awkward and dishonest, it does the complete opposite of getting me excited about the release.

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