The Webb telescope just offered a revelatory view of humanity’s distant past
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Clickbait = temptation, if you want to get religious about it. That's what demons always do in the stories. They tempt. They assault the saint with powerful clickbait.
But only tabloids would fairly consistently cross the line that distinguishes a "vivid account" of something from something borderline false.
You could say that the internet, more specifically the need for "virality" engineered a race to the bottom that turned publishers into tabloid sites.
It's like having a hundred people in your living room all the time.
If you want a clear but depressing example, visit a digital archive and contrast issues of scientific American from the beginning and end of the 1990s. At the beginning of the decade it offered a serious presentation of science news/insights for a general audience (more accessible than an academic paper, but still requiring work to read, similar to a textbook). By the end of the decade standards had fallen considerably as their audience shrank and they went in the direction of greater 'accessibility' with more gee-whiz articles, columnists etc, and even introducing a larger body text font to reduce the content while maintaining the same page count.
It seems to me that the main drivers were popular access to the internet and a general drop in attention spans, along with the proliferation of cable TV channels during the same period, and the rise of '24 hour news' outlets like CNN and Fox News, both of which are cancerous. Television in general is trash, with an endless focus on effects and visual gimmicks designed to hypnotize rather than inform or educate.
Like I get what they were going for, but unless we know that the matter that we are made of is there in this image than it is a scientific inaccuracy that I wish we did not actively spread.
Now I know that we are looking into the past here, but unless my understanding of space is wrong the only way this would actually be true is if our sun (and other related material) moved faster than the speed of light.
At least that is how I read the headline, that the image shown is (or would be) the material that makes us up now.
Without heavy elements from collapsing stars we can't exist, so in a real sense the birth of these stars is a very early step in humanity's existence.
There's nothing about humanity's distant past or even the universe's past at all.
This is a filler article, at most.
We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion year old carbon
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden
Well, then can I roam beside you?
I have come to lose the smog,
And I feel myself a cog in somethin' turning
And maybe it's the time of year
Yes and maybe it's the time of man
And I don't know who I am
But life is for learningI recommend finding these stars (they will have distinctive and similar compositions) and treating them as SETI targets, on the off chance life originated before the star cluster dispersed and then spread between the closely spaced systems (panspermia).
https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2023/128/01H...
amazing detail on those fibers/roots-like clouds
https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01H44ARCYBXAE95TXH1KGCFZ35.tif https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01H44AVB69N1P8RAEJ12NW2RB2.png
At 300 dpi, these would be around 40x40 inches. I do see a lot of artifacts in the large images, but it probably looks decent on a print.
> But it is very real, showcasing the process of stars being born a mere 390 light years from Earth. This is the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth.
> Given the nursery's proximity and Webb's unparalleled scientific instruments, we have never had this kind of crystal-clear view of these processes before. [...]
> This is a revelatory view of our own distant past. Our own star and Solar System formed a little more than 4.5 billion years ago, when a molecular cloud collapsed into what became our Sun.
Still worth taking a look, best through the zoomable image linked to by yread in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36721362
> Farther away from this star and its cavity, there are orange-ish clouds. According to the Webb telescope's astronomers, these are organic compounds known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. These carbon-rich compounds are possibly an essential part of the genesis of life, although scientists are unsure of this.
I'm afraid it reads like a fan-review of a rock gig. The information content is low.
It is a fantastic photo, though.
Here's a shot in visible light with the moon in view
https://earthsky.org/todays-image/may-lunar-eclipse-and-rho-...
Rho Ophiuchus is 'upside down' relative to the pic in TFA. The bright stars with diffraction spikes in the JWST image are the three topmost stars in the visible image that are white and obscured by dust.
I wish more astronomy photos included scale information. I like using outlines of the moon and of Saturn as appropriate units for the task at hand.
The second photo contextualizes it better as it’s a single photograph.
As the gas cloud collapses into a protostar, it undergoes adiabatic heating. The intense heat causes radiation pressure which prevents the protostar from collapsing further. (it will also do deuterium/lithium burning, but to a first approximation the protostar is heated by the gravitational collapse) Only as the excess heat is radiated away can the star shrink into a main sequence star that burns hydrogen into helium. During the protostar phase, it's enveloped in a gas cloud. As the heat from the star evaporates and blows away its gas cloud, it becomes a pre main sequence star, and it's not easily distinguishable from a main sequence star. It is a very hot object that will shine brightly. If you were to just look at it in a telescope, it will appear the same as any other star. Only after it's allowed to radiate energy away for a few tens to hundreds of thousands of years will it shrink enough to begin burning hydrogen into helium and will its collapse halt. There is no flash or anything, and it does not begin suddenly; a minor amount of fusion will happen, and then it will eventually accelerate into a steady state.
The planets would have lost surface and crustal water, probably, but might have considerable subterranian water, which might work its way to the surface through tectonic activity.
There could be ongoing water accumulation through comet and asteroid impacts from objects more remote in the solar system. Given that dwarf stars have a quite consolidated habitable zone, "remote" might be far closer in than in our own solar system.
Water could be generated through chemical action of oxides (e.g., silicates and ferrites) with hydrogen. Hydrogen itself might arrive via the solar wind.
Timescales for dwarf stars are immense, so processes which were consolidated into a few tens or hundreds of millions of years on Earth might well occur over tens, hundreds, or thousands of billions of years on a dwarf-star planet. Even slow processes (e.g., hydrogen deposition mentioned above) could contribute substantial mass over time.
Solar system is 4.5 billion years old. The sun has been around the galaxy 18 times since forming.
And as you can see from that image the gases that make up star forming regions are literally blown around by the nearby stars.
So combining fragility of a nebula with time plus 18 loops and I think it's totally gone.
Plus I saw a YouTube video a few days ago that theorised that earth sized rocky planets would only form around suns in star forming regions with nearby massive bright stars that would be actively tearing the nebula apart at the same time that the planets were forming.
I’m gonna lose my mind if one of these telescope pictures comes back with a lens flare.
We may not be in a simulation, but instead inside God’s photoshop.
The diffraction spikes on point sources are real and are an artifact of the support structures and mirror configuration of the telescope. If you look at the telescope you'll see all the mirrors are hexagonal, which corresponds to the six spikes on every point source of light.
Do you know if the colourisation essentially just a frequency shift into visible light or is there some human artistic license involved?
But ultimately it's all just data transformed into a visible image; there's plenty of scope for artistic licence in the rendering, if that's what you want.
The striking thing for me is the two diagonal red spikes pointing in opposite directions; apparently a newly-formed giant star does this.
"Huge bipolar jets of molecular hydrogen, represented in red, dominate the image, appearing horizontally across the upper third and vertically on the right. These occur when a star first bursts through its natal envelope of cosmic dust, shooting out a pair of opposing jets into space like a newborn first stretching her arms out into the world."
I don't know how that works.
The number in the filter name is (the center wavelength in nanometers) / 10, or (the center wavelength in microns) * 100. An "N" at the end means "narrow" and "W" indicates "wide".
For this image, the team used a pretty straightforward mapping of five filters to more or less the colours of the rainbow in ascending order of filter wavelength, with the shortest wavelength being mapped to purplish-blue and the longest being mapped to orange-red.
When I first got interested in imaging outside the wavelengths we can see, like a lot of people I assumed that the most "accurate" way to represent the data would be to pick three bands in order of descending wavelength and map them to the red, green, and blue channels. That can certainly be a useful approach, but there are often better ways to process the data that make it easier to see things of interest in the result. In particular, doing a R/G/B mapping means that most of the detail in the blue channel is invisible to human eyes, because they're so much less sensitive to blue. TLDR: I think the approach used for this image strikes a nice balance between "intuitive to humans with typical colour vision" and "highlights areas of interest in the image in a useful way".
[1] https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2023/128/01H...
[2] https://jwst-docs.stsci.edu/jwst-near-infrared-camera/nircam...
Also, like most analogies, this one leaks. Even if our species dies off, whatever discovers our remains has direct, tangible evidence to fall back on: the shoes were likely created by the creatures who have evidence of living on the same planet.
I find good evidence for some kind of creator (Aquinas' "five ways" make a compelling case based purely on reason), but at the end of the day this tells us nothing about "intended purposes". At that point we are relying on fallible human interpretation, which history shows is a path fraught with dragons.
Like it completely boggles my mind to try to think about how everything started, even if some theories are true and the Big Bang was not the start at some point you would think something had to be a start to "stuff".
Also frankly... religion brings comfort to a lot of people and as long as someone is not using it to harm someone else (like deny rights) than I don't think we should downplay or attack someone for believing in something that makes the hard parts (like the inevitability of death) easier to deal with.