James Webb Space Telescope captures high-resolution image of Uranus
webbtelescope.org
webbtelescope.org
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranus#/media/File:Uranus_as_s...
Arguably there is no "true" translation; the point of JW capturing what spectrum it does, is to reveal features obscured or invisible in the visible spectrum.
Over the years I have come to reject the "what would the plain eye see" position as not helpful. We're tool-using monkeys and the phones we carry around now run supercomputers to quietly show not what the plain eye sees but something which works better for our needs—to be both evocative and information-rich.
If and when we ever get a chance to gaze on Uranus ourselves, I myself imagine and hope it will be courtesy of some transformation of our embodiment that will look an order richer than even the most stylized images we have today, because they will be broad spectrum and be overlayed with semantic content rendered as perceptual to aid our executive functions... all of which will probably be running on some computation substrate other than our monkey mammal selves. Space isn't kind to those.
It seems a shame they didn't include the 400-600nm range as well.
This seems to be a basic misunderstanding of the purpose of the telescope.
To my understand, you cannot see the rings of uranus in the visible range. And remember all those first images from the JWST, those garnered public support preeetty heavily and those were all infrared and translated.
On the science side, some wavelengths just do not survive interstellar travel. You need the entire range to get the most data. Lots of times visible phenomena are just white or grey or blue anyways. When there's something that's actually more interesting in visible light, we'll see it.
If we have to survive in space, we'll have to see the rings of Uranus, if only to avoid them when we fly by in your space ship :)
As the article points out, they are extremely boring to look at. A lot of space objects are that way.
The mission of the JWST is to look at these other wavelengths where there is more interesting activity and where the signal from that activity survives the trip to (near) earth.
Complaining about JWST not making visible spectrum light images is like complaining that a hammer doesn't really work driving in a screw. It's not meant to do that, so stop trying to do it, and definitely stop complaining about it since it's just a misunderstanding of its purpose.
Think of it like the *nix core belief that you design a thing to do one thing be really fast at it and do it really well while avoiding making something that does a lot of things mediocre and not nearly as fast. We have platforms that are better at imaging visible light. A lot of them. We have nothing with the capabilities of JWST. We have X-ray telescopes. We have microwave telescopes.
Trying to ask JWST to be a shittier IR telescope to enable visible light imaging is just a waste of time, effort, and money.
[0]https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/about/faqs/faq.html?linkId...
No need to call him an "ass" over it, just apologize politely :)
it's only a shame if you don't understand the entire purpose of the telescope. if you understood the purpose of the telescope, you'd realize why trying to make it do both IR and visible light would be pointless. to catch the faintest light of the furthest galaxies that has been red-shifted we need the most sensitive instrument would could make. ignoring blue and green wavelengths is the only way of doing it. you make every decision to enhance the ability to see the red.
it's like saying it's a shame drum&bass doesn't have more guitars. you might have that opinion, but it is absolutely pointless in the purpose of the thing your opinion is about.
Which device is more impressive and would garner more public support for the project: an amplifier which just makes the squeaks louder? Or one which also pitches down the squeaks into a range where we can actually perceive and appreciate the tune & dynamics of the underlying music?
It's how we generally see pictures of Earth, e.g. from the point of view of a space walk from the ISS.
If I look out the window of my spaceship and Uranus doesn't look like this photo, the post processing done here doesn't match with "reality" too well.
And since showing infrared picture to folks who can't see in it is less than pointless, they just shift it all into visible to a 'place' on spectrum which makes most sense for given picture. There can be some choosing fancier shades done there for general public but I would be surprised if they completely re-painted original 'shift' just to look more fancy (happy to learn the facts if anybody knows in any case).
If you want to look very deep into the past, say, 13 billion years ago, any light from galaxies that old has traveled 13 billion light years PLUS however much the universe has expanded and will be red-shifted out of the visible spectrum, so you need an infra-red telescope to see it. Hence, JWST.
You simply can't see these things without using instruments that can detect the right light.
On top of that, everything in the universe emits light across a broad spectrum, above and below the visible spectrum. We can enhance our knowledge of these things; stars, planets, galaxies, etc by using instruments that can "see" infra-red, radio, x-ray, gamma ray and that is additional information on top of what our eyes can see in the visible spectrum.
punchline drum roll
As an aside, either get or borrow a decent telescope and see the rings of Saturn and the Galilean Moons for yourself. It’s a really neat experience and gives you a direct personal shared experience with the birth of modern astronomy.
The rings just conform to that axis of rotation along with moons and such.
Also, rings are thought to be relatively recent feature of Uranus (on the order of hundreds of millions of years).
Now, there was also the part about her thinking the Mexican–American War was in 1989. Which is Taylor Swift's birthday, her favorite artist. Which is hilarious on so many levels.
So that's what The Great War is about!
there was a president that thought we had airplanes during the revolutionary war, so hopefully the date mix up wasn't judged too harshly
Jupiter also has ring, but it is not apparent.
But also occlude has a chemistry meaning when one substance gets hidden inside another, so maybe it was too overloaded to be a good word for that.
> Did occult mean what it does now when they started?
A word can have more than one meaning. The first definition on merriam-webster.com covers the definition used in astronomy:
occult (v.): to shut off from view or exposure: cover, eclipse [2]
The adjective form might be a source of derivation for the meaning you're alluding to:
occult (adj.): (1) not revealed: secret; (2) not easily apprehended or understood: abstruse, mysterious; (3) hidden from view: concealed [2]
And finally, the paranormal meaning that people are more familiar with today:
occult (n): matters regarded as involving the action or influence of supernatural or supernormal powers or some secret knowledge of them -> used with the [2]
Again, I don't know the history of these words. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd bet that the noun form, "the occult", is derived from the adjective form since "the occult" refers to supernatural phenomena, which is naturally hidden from view, concealed, not revealed, secret, not easily apprehended or understood, etc (because it's not real).
Edit: Another guess. If you think about the history of astronomy, it was originally intertwined with religion and astrology. Perhaps these words date back to a time when "the occult" and astronomy weren't entirely separate. Anyways, I agree. Language is strange.
As distinct from non-occult blood, which is probably just from asteroids.
In all honesty, is there any place where i can view the curriculum that children in my area are being taught? They don't tell us about those changes but they might put it somewhere. I, for one, think the news should do something useful and teach us the updates from time to time. Could you imagine if all that politicking was instead useful scientific information?
I was like, “Wait, what? When did that happen?” Apparently it was disproven for decades and I never knew. I felt like the old people who held onto their old beliefs that I felt such disdain for. He also went on to tell me that the brontosaurus didn’t exist either and I had enough.
Plus a lot of missing link evidence was apparently made up!
In any case, if you have any sources, would be appreciated.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_link_(human_evolutio...
So it seems that the name "missing link" has gone out of favor because it implies a linear evolution instead of branches. But in a branch you can still have missing links I would say.
So I feel the scientists just didn't like that there was a term made up for something they can't explain yet. And the various solutions to the missing link story turned out to not fit or be a hoax, so I guess that is what you mean by "has been made up".
The wiki article says at the end of the introduction:
"There is no singular missing link. The scarcity of transitional fossils can be attributed to the incompleteness of the fossil record."
So there is not a singular missing link, but there are multiple missing links! What a smart way to sweep this issue under the rug. And then we can also say that there was never any evidence for the missing link. Which funnily enough is the whole problem, that there isn't any evidence for a species before human sapiens which would explain our evolutionary connection with another primate species.
If evidence for this missing link would be found, or evidence that would make the missing link unnecessary, I think it would be big news, not go unnoticed and that we find out from our children.
I guess they want our children to think that there are not really any big issues with our current theories. Like they did with us when we were children.
In all seriousness, it's really quite interesting to see what has changed in 30 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_system#Ring_systems_of_pl...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/02/TheIrreg...
The only thing missing from the graphic is each moons axial tilt with respect to either its orbit or the rest of the solar system.
It most likely that at some point Uranus was hit by a planet and the collision changed the spin axis. Must have been pretty early for everything else to be aligned with the new axis.
Probably a stupid question but how'd it get this vantage? Isn't JWST at a LaGrange point from Earth? Wouldn't that be on the same plane? I suppose it must not be in order to have taken this image.
“Near the solstice, one pole faces the Sun continuously and the other faces away, with only a narrow strip around the equator experiencing a rapid day–night cycle, with the Sun low over the horizon. On the other side of Uranus's orbit, the orientation of the poles towards the Sun is reversed. Each pole gets around 42 years of continuous sunlight, followed by 42 years of darkness.”
Very different from Earth! Wow.
Voyager saw this: https://www.flickr.com/photos/132160802@N06/40079347843
Even that's better than we'd see with our eyes:
> The rings here are significantly fainter relative to Uranus than pictured here; the charcoal black rings would be near the limits of naked eye visibility to a human observer.
Aside: I think the most useful instrument for NASA's mission at the moment is a boolean "Life/no-life" indicator on each planet, moon, asteroid, etc. Not very pretty.
Meanwhile, the photos from the probes that actually went there are from more unusual angles and you can see some more amount of the night side.
Similar to how images from something like the Himawari satellite (from geostationary orbit) quickly become a lot less visually interesting than photos from the ISS.
That said, JWST does have some images with an ethereal quality of that bygone age of space. Its images of Jupiter's auroras and the Whirlpool Galaxy make me feel quite some things, and it did by far the best NGC 1433.
Not sure what exactly that means for human eyesight, but it's probably less spectacular out there than we'd hope.
Consumer digital cameras around 2005 could see maybe 9 stops for a single exposure. Now they can do maybe 10-14 (which means they’re ~30x more capable of a range of light values).
Human vision can handle adapting to a much wider range because we don’t see with a single exposure. The iris adjusts, we saccade around the scene collecting data and mentally aggregating it. A good approximation is the iPhone’s panorama mode. It’s really recording video and adapting the dynamic range window as you pan, so the sun tends not to blown out the rest of the image.
The main point I want to make is that outdoor sunlight on earth is indeed a million times more intense in terms of lux, lumens, candelas, or watts, than interior living (say lit by a nightlight or candle). This works out to 20 stops.
- 100,000 lux outdoors on earth
- 0.1 lux finding your seat in a theater
So we can see already when the light is 0.0001% the power of “Earth, noon”. We could see Uranus.
Sunlight on earth is extremely intense! You feel it direct on your skin like being 2 feet from a fire. It damages your cells. It evaporates the sea and propels hurricanes. I’d we hadn’t evolved to live with it, we’d find it quite intolerable.
Uranus gets 350 lux[1], which is similar to the light level at sunrise on Earth.
So quite dim but not dark.
[0] https://academic.oup.com/astrogeo/article/58/1/1.31/2938119
Pointed out the window[1]: 1/2000th
The interior of my office[2]: 1/30th
My office feels brightly lit to me, but the ambient light level is only about 1-2% of what it is outdoors. I estimate that 0.25% is roughly how bright it is indoors on an overcast day or outdoors at twilight on a clear day. It's dim, but people with unimpaired vision have no trouble seeing in that light level and the planet would still look spectacular.
1. Grass and trees with no sky in frame.
2. Shades open, light grey walls mostly. Same ISO and aperture.
Image Description from Nasa site:
> This image of Uranus from NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows the planet and its rings in new clarity. The planet’s seasonal north polar cap gleams in a bright white, and Webb’s exquisite sensitivity resolves Uranus’ dim inner and outer rings, including the Zeta ring—the extremely faint and diffuse ring closest to the planet.
> This Webb image also shows 14 of the planet’s 27 moons: Oberon, Titania, Umbriel, Juliet, Perdita, Rosalind, Puck, Belinda, Desdemona, Cressida, Ariel, Miranda, Bianca, and Portia.
> One day on Uranus is about 17 hours, so the planet’s rotation is relatively quick. This makes it supremely difficult for observatories with a sharp eye like Webb to capture one simple image of the entire planet – storms and other atmospheric features, and the planet’s moons, move visibly within minutes. This image combines several longer and shorter exposures of this dynamic system to correct for those slight changes throughout the observing time.
> Webb’s extreme sensitivity also picks up a smattering of background galaxies—most appear as orange smudges, and there are two larger, fuzzy white galaxies to the right of the planet in this field of view.
Straying off topic, but be careful what you wish for. I have great eyesight, and have developed my ability to see/notice details considerably throughout my life. (Which btw is super under rated, “seeing” is about much more than just light being focused in your retinas, its incredible to me how things that used to look really complicated or looked a complete mess when I was a teenager are now just a bunch of components and as a result easy to see.)
My experience is that I notice how imperfect everything is, constantly. I go to someones place they lived in for years and notice all kinds of things they never picked up on, mismatched moulding or paint or texture, wood grain not matching in furniture, light limescale on porcelain, heat marks, cammed out fasteners, fixtures that are not square, plumb and flush, bubbling peeling paint. I could go on and on.
Being discerning is kind of a bummer if you can’t put it to good use.
I really think HN should remove “high resolution” from the title of this post because it’s editorialized and false, but it’s not a big deal.
https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/new-webb-image-captures-cl...
The expectations humans have on new technology ceases to amaze me especially when something is unbelievably impressive and people are like, that's all?
This being said, that image is still better than anything else we have seen from other telescopes
Distance from earth to Uranus varies between 2.6-3.2e12 m from Earth [1]. Speed of light in vacuum is 3e8 m/s, so calling the distance 3e12 to make the math easy, it's 1e4s (2 and 7/9 hours) for light to travel between earth and Uranus.
[1] https://www.space.com/18709-uranus-distance.html#:~:text=How....
The distance between continents is hard enough for the human brain to comprehend, and imagine the difficulty in trying to caputure an image with a telephoto lens of some resolvable feature in japan, from europe or america (forgetting the shape of the Earth's surface for a moment).
Of course ever graceful, nature offers us a compromise. Most astronomical object (galaxies, nebula) are very big, and very very far away. It is not resolution that makes it difficult to see them (since they span an appreciable arc-width of our sky, e.g. search pictures of the angular width of andromeda galaxy or the orion nebula compared to the moon), but how faint they are.
The photons they emit are travelling across swathes of the observable universe. They travel across scales where the presence of galaxy clusters warp the geometry of space-time, a turbulant voyage for these light rays. They travel across distances where space itself inflates like a balloon, the expanding universe sapping energy from them until they arrive in our detectors or eyeballs redshifted beyond recognision. This is why observatories and satellite-telescopes need to place a huge emphasis on scaling up mirror size to scoop up all the photons they possibly can, as opposed to strictly focusing on resolution - as an earthbound photographer might naively expect.
Now consider the nature of planets, they are not diffuse clouds of molecules or dust lanes spanning galactic widths, they are tightly bound, tangible, physical objects. Now they might be our neighbours, trapped in the same spiral around the sun's gravitational well, but that doesn't mean they're "close" in any sense that the human mind could every really fathom. If we want to resolve atmospheric or geographic (is that even the right word for other planets?) features, we need to be able to achieve precise resolutions beyond what is normally required for other types of astronomical observation. Indeed, if you've every taken a class on optics or astronomy, you might be suprised how quickly fundamental limits of resolution that arise from lights wave-like behaviour - like airy disks - begin to veil that which we wish to observe, when playing around with frequiencies and aperture widths on a "humman" scale.
If the Sun were a ping pong ball, the closest star would be 1500 km away. It is utterly mind blowing expressed that way.
Indeed, our best chance to travel that enormous distance to our next door neighbour is perhaps to take our entire Earth there.
Part of the trouble is that it’s really far away.
Keck has a 10-meter aperture and its image of Uranus looks like this: https://keckobservatory.org/keck_pictures_of_uranus_show_bes...
https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/12/01/webb-space-telescope-ke...
> Though the quality of the JWST and Keck images may look about the same to the untrained eye, de Pater noted that JWST has instruments that can measure aspects of Titan’s atmosphere that Keck cannot, complementing one another. In particular, JWST’s infrared spectroscopic capability allows it to pinpoint the altitudes of clouds and hazes with much better accuracy.
> “By using spectrometers on JWST together with the optical image quality with Keck, we get a really complete picture of Titan,” she said, such as the heights of clouds, the atmosphere’s optical thickness, and the elevation of haze in the atmosphere.
> In particular, at wavelengths where Earth’s atmosphere is opaque — that is, Titan cannot be seen from any Earth-based telescope — JWST can observe and provide information on the lower atmosphere and surface.
It amazes me that we can detect any of those with telescopes so far away. Does anyone have a rough explanation for how this is possible?
Highest magnification is approximately 2x the aperture in mm, and 300x is approximately the atmospheric limit.
Admittedly I've been having trouble reliably locating it. Currently it's near the middle of a line between the Pleiades and Jupiter. From where I am there are no naked eye visible stars in the region to help walk the scope in.
A modern probe to the ice giants is long overdue. Plenty of missions were proposed over decades, but none actually made it.
This is pretty amazing. I knew Uranus required sensitive instruments, but didn't realize the payoff would be so rewarding.
But I've always been curious, I've heard it both ways: If I were on a space ship exploring the outer planets looking out a regular-ass glass window, would the rings of Jupiter, Neptune, and Uranus even be visible to the naked eye? I mean I know Saturn's rings are incredibly apparent, but for the other 3 gas giants?
For example, many of the Voyager pics of Uranus don't have the rings visible, and the ones that do are colored oddly and make me assume that this is some kind of massive false-color high-gain thing to make them visible.
Even the planet itself would be dim, at 20AU from the sun, it would be 400x dimmer than the earth, close to the brightness of dawn/dusk on earth.
Probably capturing a bunch of civilizations with their own Caesars, revolutions and a variety of delicious cocktails in the background.
Maybe if we make it past the ecosystem collapse, one day people will take the Grand Tour in person. (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune)
That is, how it usually is ..
Wikipedia says [1] the solar radiation on Uranus is 3.4-4 W/m^2. Imagine lighting up a square meter of wall with a 3W pocket inspection light, or a mood-lit room with just a few 8W bulbs. Reading might be a little bit of a strain after a while, but I think your eyes would quickly adjust.
When New Horizons was going past Pluto, Nasa put out the #PlutoTime website [2]. Pluto is about 30 AU from Earth, Uranus is about 20 AU out, so at a particular moment around twilight - when it's bright enough to walk around without artificial lighting and to take a photo - it will be as bright as it is on Uranus. The widget is dead, but it's still accessible through archive.org. Unfortunately, it's no longer accurate, it seems to be linked to the time and date when the site was archived. I'm neither a web dev nor an astronomer, but I exported the JS and it seems to provide reasonable results:
https://jsfiddle.net/9btumsj6/
Anyone have an idea of what solar_angle should be to simulate Uranus or Neptune? Apparently, when the sun is -1.5 degrees below the horizon here, that's about right for Pluto illumination. Just reducing the angle by three from -1.5 to -0.5 changes the time by about 6 minutes of twilight...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight#Intensity_in_the_Sola...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20150827083531/http://solarsyste...
Which makes me wonder: if a ship was covered in, say, 10 metres of ice, would the top layer get irradiated and thus need to be replaced every so often? I wonder if it was left exposed to space, would the water ice sublimate away? Then "all" you'd need to do is replace the top layer.
Humans safe behind ice while robots do the work isn't quite as romantic as The Expanse but it'll get the job done!
For some reason, the original Hubble Deep Field image didn't viscerally affect me much -- but this one did. Maybe because it helped me to imagine just how much Hubble Deep Fields are there in our night sky.
I really hope we get a better look at the moons of Neptune and Uranus sooner than later. They seem to have lots of interesting history.
It's the highest priority probe, but wouldn't get there until the 2050s. To borrow a thought from idlewords, we could be sending cameras to every large object in the solar system for way less than it's costing to develop the current Moon program ($93 billion through 2025).
Humans? There are probably better destinations in the solar system that we’d go during the period between it becoming technically/economically feasible, and humans being replaced with robots.
How? Science isn't magic. If you want to get to places in the solar system on human time scales, you have to go FAST. Mars already is about 6 months away in the IDEAL circumstances. We don't have a good idea of how to go faster than we can now without literally blowing up nukes behind our ship, and hoping we can magically ride the waves reliably, and even that is not exactly revolutionary in terms of speed.
So now you're literally hoping for some scientific advancement that either bends space so that most things are "closer", allows humans to not die after a significant amount of down time but also makes humans not care about missing out on family and friends and making a brand new life anytime you want to go somewhere else, or a way to magically reach insane speeds. This is ignoring the fact that we don't even think massless propulsion is possible, let alone useful, so we would be stuck with using electricity to accelerate the lightest particles we can manage to as near light speed as physically possible.
People keep acting like science is some magic world and it's only a matter of time until science somehow does science fiction, but that's just as absurd as thinking it's only a matter of time until psychologists unlock the secret of telekinesis. It's fantasy. Reality has put very rough boundaries on everything, and while there is some wiggle room for new things to refine our understanding of the universe, any effects and forces we have yet missed would have to be so small or inconsequential as to be meaningless. If you think some future discovery would NOT be inconsequential, now you have to explain how it has hidden from us for all this time. Even "revolutions" in the field of physics that changed how we understand reality itself, like quantum anything, didn't totally change the math. Newton's equations are still mostly valid at human scales! The "wrong" model that caused the very Ultraviolet Catastrophe that lead to the discovery and building of quantum mechanics is still mostly correct for low frequency radiation!
This is a level of unwarranted confidence far exceeding my own, in my opinion :)
Uranus is 2.66 light-hours from the sun. At 0.01% light-speed, that's about 3 years. 3 years is a long time to travel, especially in the modern age, but not a long time to be alive, even for a human today. Is it possible we dramatically extend our lifespans or achieve technological immortality in the future? I certainly think so.
Can we reach 0.01c traveling between Earth and Uranus? Maybe not, because we have to accelerate half way and decelerate the second half. But I would feel much sillier saying that sub-decade interplanetary travel is absolutely impossible than saying that it's possible. Than saying we'll unlock new materials and techniques that make it possible eventually. I'm not even saying to expect them within a century. Think about millennia of uninterrupted technological advancement driven by superhuman AI - you're saying with certainty that it's not possible we'll figure out how to travel within our own solar system on human timespans after all that time? It'll be a boring future if we're already hitting the absolute limits of space travel and we've just started.
> Science isn't magic.
No, magic is just science we haven't figure out yet.
Death appears inevitable, but there's little difference between a century and a millennium as far as physics is concerned. I don't think it's far-fetched to assume we'll crack this one eventually.
> and making a brand new life anytime you want to go somewhere else
This has been the norm for travellers for most of human history. The modern two-day circumnavigation / perceptually-instant transatlantic broadband is nice, but not necessary. The solar system is a light-day in diameter (order of magnitude), so a round-trip by radio is faster than letters used to be.
There are other, better, designs for nuclear rockets beside the Orion drive. Some proof of concept devices have already been built. And if we could get our hands on sufficient quantities of anti-matter there are even better designs for anti-matter rockets. It’s an engineering problem not a problem of fundamental physics.
At 2G constant accel/decel, it'll take ~8.5 days to get to Uranus, reaching a top speed of 2.3% of light speed (14.2 million m/s), and experiencing 17 seconds of time dilation (https://chat.openai.com/share/b93297e1-b089-46d1-8314-a2235b...). :)
Ice shielding sounds good, but then we are back to the tyranny of the rocket equation.
[1] which we don’t even have a path to, afaik. Straight scifi right now.
Not really, we don't have to lift up ice from Earth. We can just cook water out of clays in near earth asteroids.
We are gods of our solar system, bound only by ourselves.
> Distance: The average distance from Earth to Uranus is about 2.6 billion kilometers, but this can vary greatly depending on the planets' positions in their orbits.
Space.com (a relatively relatable source) thinks otherwise [1]:
> Because the solar system is in constant motion, the distance between Earth and Uranus changes daily. The closest the two get is 1.6 billion miles (2.6 billion kilometers). At their farthest, they are separated by 1.98 billion miles (3.2 billion km).
…which works out to ~2.9b km.
We can also calculate it ourselves. Earth is ~0.15b km from the Sun [2], Uranus is 2.7–3b km from the Sun on average [3]. Thus the distance varies between 2.65b km and 3.15b km, which means the average is (again) ~2.9b km.
Not 2.6b km as ChatGPT claimed.
Which changes the result to 8.9 days.
Which is not a huge difference, but would you know any better if ChatGPT said the distance is 5b km?
[1]: https://www.space.com/18709-uranus-distance.html
Let's take your question, "Would you know better if it said 5b km?". Nope, I wouldn't have a clue - or care!
ChatGPT informed me in SECONDS and 3-4 prompts that "At 2G constant accel/decel, it'll take ~8.5 days to get to Uranus, reaching a top speed of 2.3% of light speed (14.2 million m/s), and experiencing 17 seconds of time dilation."
Even if each of those numbers were off by a factor of two, it still gave me a greater intuition for the problem space than I had before.
I couldn't guess whether the flight time would be measured in days or years. With 4 prompts and 4 minutes invested, I had an answer within 11% (according to your sources, which I also didn't fact-check because it doesn't matter for this type of back-of-the-napkin work).
I didn't hide the fact of where this information came from - I cited my source. My hope was to share this new intuition of the problem space I'd received, so that HN viewers wouldn't have to invest even the small effort I did to enjoy these fun back-of-the-napkin numbers. The answer of <9 days was shocking to me!
Rather than banning intellectual curiosity and shunning use of our new amazing tools like ChatGPT/Claude/Bard/Mistral, I suggest we openly discuss and share our processes with each other. Who knows, maybe we'll learn something cool!
Here's its Python code it used to calculate travel days:
# Constants
acceleration = 2 * 9.81 # 2G in m/s^2
distance_to_uranus_km = 2.6e9 # Average distance to Uranus in kilometers
distance_to_uranus_m = distance_to_uranus_km * 1000 # Convert to meters
# Distance for half the journey
half_distance = distance_to_uranus_m / 2
# Time to reach halfway point (t = sqrt(2d/a))
# Using formula d = 1/2 * a * t^2, rearranged for t
time_to_halfway = (2 * half_distance / acceleration)**0.5
# Total time for the journey (double the halfway time)
total_travel_time = 2 * time_to_halfway
# Convert total time from seconds to days for easier interpretation
total_travel_time_days = total_travel_time / (24 * 3600)
total_travel_time_days
# Calculate top speed at halfway point (v = at)
top_speed = acceleration * time_to_halfway
# Convert top speed from m/s to km/h for easier interpretation
top_speed_kmh = top_speed * 3.6
top_speed_kmh
> Nope, I wouldn't have a clue - or care!
I find this just baffling right next to you talking about "greater intuition" or "intellectual curiosity". You don't care if your "intellectual curiosity" is feeding on complete misinformation?
You didn't do any "back-of-the-napkin math" (I did, but you, by your admission, don't care), you just took a plausible-looking factoid and run with it. It's equivalent to believing the first SEO spam listicle Google returned and calling it "intellectual curiosity" — worse, in fact, because at least there is a slight chance of an actual human checking those listicle "facts".
I believe the "process" you refer to is roughly:
- pay for GPT-4
- type a question in
- take the answer on faith
- post it elsewhere without doing any work to verify it
Is this correct? If so, I just don't think it's a good process. It also has no "back-of-the-napkin calculations" that you weirdly insist on, you didn't do a single addition in the entire "process".
are those light rings portrayed this way because its debris orbiting at a very long exposure ?
Finding Uranus analogues would also be particularly challenging since we cannot expect to ever confirm one using telescopes, given that a Uranus orbit takes ~84 years and you need to observe at least 3 full orbits to confirm a planet.
Any Uranus-sized object orbiting significantly closer to its host star (i.e. able to be confirmed within a human lifetime) would likely differ from Uranus as it would either receive substantially more energy from its host star or have a completely different host star altogether (e.g. a red dwarf), which may have an impact on its composition.
Only if you use the transit method.
We have a candidate detection for a gas giant similar to Neptune directly imaged with an orbit slightly larger than Earth's at Alpha Centauri (but it hasn't been observed for long enough to confirm and needs follow-up observations).
If we're getting candidate detections now with our current capabilities, then it only gets better over time. Even in the next 1-3 decades.
Cheaper and larger rockets means larger space telescopes. More time also means better sensors and better noise processing algorithms. Perhaps even interferometry in space.
There's also, quantum telescopes (which are orders of magnitude more powerful than traditional mirror based telescopes) which we'll be trying to scale up as we move ahead.
I'm not as optimistic about future telescopes, though. If projects like the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope or the (now cancelled) Terrestrial Planet Finder are anything to go by. Despite receiving the satellite, bus systems, and mirror for free, it still took a over decade and billions of dollars to get NGRST working.
Hopefully that changes in the near future, but it seems as if rockets are not the limiting factor here.
> butt
The submitter actually changed it from the original title (unless the title has been updated since it was submitted).
As the saying goes: "You can grow old, but you don't need to grow up."
...butt yes I giggled.
u so fat that: "Uranus' orbit is 20x further from the Sun than Earth, which means it only gets 0.25% as much sunlight."
wish i was an astronomer :').
Gorgeous images tho, everything seemed perfectly angled for a glamour shot.
https://brent-noorda.com/nombas/us/index.htm
"Nombas doesn't exist any more. All the good stuff was sold to Openwave, then sold to someone else, then sold to someone else, then I lost track."
You certainly wouldn't get 60FPS, that's for sure.
Anyone else get frustrated with the accepted practice in astronomy to (a) alter colors and (b) show the non-visible light spectrum.
Because it results in radically different images from what we can see with our human eye and its hugely misleading to the general public.
NASA has a whole article on this subject; it’s a great read.
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/science/science-behi...
Is setting an ISO radically changing things?
Is setting an exposure time radically changing things?
Is having an RGGB bayer pattern radically changing things?
Is having only a 91% quantum efficiency sensor radically changing things?
The questions keep going, I could ask about hot pixel removal, denoise, contrast and saturation, wavelength response curves.
Cameras aren't eyes.
Photos aren't biochemical reactions.
Regular consumer cameras are designed to be as close as possible to what the human eye sees. They're very obviously chosen to be responsive to R, G and B. Not infrared, yellow and UVB.
An image like this is not meant to try to match the human eye.
To try to say all cameras don't match the eyes is a false equivalence. Some are purposefully trying to match, some are purposefully trying not to (like this one).
It's all false color to make something look good.
Cameras are still designed to try to be able to match what the human eye perceives, regardless of what you edit afterwards.
An infrared telescope is not. Totally and utterly different. They're not the same.
I do get what you are trying to say here and I know I'm taking your argument to the extreme, but... bear in mind that even 2 randomly selected humans would see different things looking at the same object.
Even though no human can see the light that JWST is capturing doesn't mean it is not there. The colors are false indeed (compared to what a typical human would perceive as color), but then we also would get absolutely no pictures from JWST to look at.
Good! That's why we have spent $10B on it!
If you want to take issue with something then I'd save my anger for the cameras that no longer show you what you are looking at, not for a scientific instrument doing exactly what it is meant to do and adaptations to show the output to the general public.
Edit: and what is misleading about it? You have to understand how the image is made. But I think NASA is making that clear, even more with the article you linked. What should NASA do otherwise? Not share these images with the public? That doesn't sound like something nice and helpful.