Happy Thought for 15 July 2022

Have a Happy Thought: 

Everywhere we look (in the sky), there's galaxies everywhere.

- NASA's Jane Rigby, the operations project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, earlier this week.

 

If you know me at all, and you have paid any attention to science news this week, you already knew what this week’s email was going to be about.

 

The first images have been released from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST to save my poor fingers).

[Long-time readers may remember that I wrote about the JWST a couple of years ago. Click here to refresh your memory.]

A quick reminder, though:

This telescope replaces Hubble, which has opened up the universe to us. JWST sees further, and in more detail. After its long-delayed launch on Christmas day, 2021, and problem-free unfolding, NASA released the first images earlier this week, and…

 Stunning doesn’t even do these justice!

 Here’s a couple of the highlights.

 

You see the arcs, or streaks? These are galaxies (!!), whose images have been stretched and warped by a really massive galaxy in between them and us. This stretching is known as “gravitational lensing”.

 

By the way, taking this “photo” of the universe took the JWST less than a day; it would have taken Hubble weeks to gather the same amount of data. Even then, it wouldn’t be as sharp an image.

Here’s some more examples of JWST images (above) vs Hubble images (below)

Image credits: Hubble (left) and JWST (right). Side-by-side comparison thanks to https://twitter.com/solarrsystem

 

If you want to see more comparisons (before and after our camera upgrade), check out this thread:

https://twitter.com/solarrsystem/status/1546879799838269444?s=20&t=4Q2KEWRsAJ1lxvig43mABw

and this one:

https://twitter.com/c_victor_astro/status/1546641504323633152?s=20&t=B82VFMGf6IEF1g8RkdZPwQ

 

or, you can directly compare the two images, with a slider tool, here:

http://www.webbcompare.com/

 

The insane thing is that this telescope lets us see back in time. See, light takes time to travel. So if something is light-years away, we are seeing it like it was when the light left it… years ago. The JWST lets us see things up to 100 million light years away (cue Austin Powers bad-guy). Which means we are seeing the universe like it was, 100 million years ago!

Image: USA Today graphics

 

Since this is publicly funded, all of the images from the JWST are available for anyone to download, look at, and/or do science with!

https://webbtelescope.org/resource-gallery/images

(by the way, the same is true of Hubble: https://hubblesite.org/resource-gallery/images)

 

There are so many astronomers and science communicators on Twitter to thank for this information:

Dr Chiara Mingarelli

Dr Katie Mack

C_Victor_Astro

Joalda Morancy

Just to name a few!

And the inspirational quote found here: https://www.capradio.org/news/npr/story?storyid=1111002820

 

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