JWST Images

[The Bookwyrm he/him]

So, some of you might know that I'm an astronomy nerd. (It's in my signature.) And today, the first image from the most cutting-edge space telescope yet has been released.

Behold, the first publicly released image from the James Webb Space Telescope:

Bask in its amazingness.

The first thing that really stood out to me was the gravitational lensing that we can see. What it looks like to me is that the big central elliptical galaxy is lensing most of the more distant galaxies into that characteristic ring shape. (Those distant galaxies look redder due to redshift caused by the universe's expansion, so they're a little easier to spot.) The closer galaxies that aren't being lensed must be closer to us than that large elliptical one. There's so much to dig into, but I'm no expert, and so I can't wait to figure out what discoveries are going to be made from this image alone.

The galaxies are all incredibly detailed. I love this picture. It really opens your eyes to how big the universe really is. I can't wait for the other images, which come out tomorrow.

This thread is for any and all astronomy nerds that want to discuss this image, and the ones that are coming later. And if I'm the only one that posts on this thread, then so be it, because I can just bask in the glory of these images myself.

And if you don't want to talk about the science behind it and would rather just rant about how cool it looks, that works too.

EDIT: Here's the NASA article that will do a much better job of explaining this than me. https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/nasa-s-webb-delivers-deepest-infrared-image-of-universe-yet

Edited July 11, 2022 by The Bookwyrm

[That1Cellist he/him]

YAY! That's all I have to say. yesyesyesyesyesyes

[Shining Silhouette he/him]

Woah! It's beautiful! All the different textures and sizes and colors... truly incredible!

25 minutes ago, The Bookwyrm said:

Those distant galaxies look redder due to redshift caused by the universe's expansion, so they're a little easier to spot.

So that means that the smaller blue ones in the image are closer to us than the massive red ones? 

Edit: this quote from the article BLOWS my mind. "This slice of the vast universe [the image] covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground."

Edited July 11, 2022 by Shining Silhouette

[The Bookwyrm he/him]

To answer your question @Shining Silhouette, yes. Those large red galaxies are the real deal for all those scientists: they're trying to get the earliest look at the universe they can. Those red galaxies are probably some of the first ones that ever formed in the universe, and in this image, we're seeing them as they looked around 13 billion years ago. (I think.)

Edited July 11, 2022 by The Bookwyrm

[Shining Silhouette he/him]

3 minutes ago, The Bookwyrm said:

To answer your question @Shining Silhouette, yes. Those large red galaxies are the real deal for all those scientists: they're trying to get the earliest look at the universe they can. Those red galaxies are probably some of the first ones that ever formed in the universe, and in this image, we're seeing them as they looked around 13 billion years ago. (I think.)

That's awesome! I don't know too much about astronomy myself, but I'm definitely interested in learning more.

What kinds of things can we learn from these images?

[The Bookwyrm he/him]

Just now, Shining Silhouette said:

What kinds of things can we learn from these images?

Mostly, I think what they're trying to get from images like this is the clues for how the first galaxies formed. Galactic Archeology (yes, that's a real term) is a field that is still shrouded in mystery, and one of JWST's purposes is to look as far back as we can to see the earliest galaxies and find out how they formed.

This isn't even the deepest image that JWST will take, so we'll probably learn a lot more through as it continues to take pictures.

JWST also has the capability to take an image of an exoplanet (a planet in another solar system) and analyze its atmosphere to figure out if it's inhabitable. I'm just as excited for those discoveries as the ones about galaxies.

[Shining Silhouette he/him]

The JWST orbits the sun 1,000,000 miles from earth? I know that's really miniscule, but the Hubble is only 340 miles away. Kind of incredible

[The Wandering Wizard he/him]

That is astounding and incredible.

[Emery the Steelrunner he/him]

The JWST is also an infrared telescope. This means it can see light that has traveled farther away and longer than that of what the Hubble can see. This allows it to effectively see farther into the past than the Hubble did.

[Robin Sedai she/her]

Man, that's cool!

[Medium he/they]

That is GORGEOUS!!!

[The Bookwyrm he/him]

Now, we have some more images. They are all incredible.

This first one isn't an actual image, but the spectroscopy data from an exoplanet called WASP-96 b.

WASP-96 b is a gas giant that is closer to it's star than Mercury is to our sun, making it very hot. The spectroscopy data from Webb shows water vapor in the atmosphere. While this isn't an actual image, some of the science Webb is going to be doing with these exoplanets in the future is really exciting for me.

Here's a link to an article with more info: Link

 

This next image is of a planetary nebula created by a star's death, called the Southern Ring Nebula. The image on the left is in near-infrared, while the image on the right is in mid-infrared.

You can see so much detail in these images. It's incredible. Something interesting that you can see in the image on the right is that this dying star is part of a binary system, with a reddish star hiding right next to the blue one. The smaller, reddish star is the one that is dying; it produced the Southern Ring Nebula.

Here's the NASA article for more information: Link

 

This image is really cool. It's a picture of a five gravitationally interacting galaxies known as Stephan's Quintet.

You can see really fine detail in these galaxies. If you look at the large galaxy on the left, you can almost make out individual stars, which is insane.

This image is of the same quintet (minus the bottom galaxy) but filtered differently.

Looking at the image in this way reveals tons of new details, most noteworthy being what looks like a huge star glowing in the center of the galaxy in the top right. That is no star. It's instead an active black hole. The supermassive black hole at the center of that galaxy is currently feeding on large amounts of gas and dust, and that causes it to glow brightly enough to outshine the rest of the entire galaxy.

And once again, here's the NASA article: Link

 

This last image might be my favorite. It's of the Carina Nebula, and the image (or maybe the specific part of the nebula?) has been nicknamed the Cosmic Cliffs.

This nebula is what's known as a Stellar Nursery, meaning a place where there is a lot of gas and dust to facilitate large amounts of star formation. You can see a ton of stars in this nebula, and many of them formed directly from the gas and dust that makes up the nebula. It really is a beautiful sight.

NASA article with more info: Link

 

So there you have it. A bunch of new images from the latest and most advanced space telescope yet. This is only the beginning, and I can't wait to see what other images Webb is going to take, and what incredible things we're going to learn from them.

Edited July 12, 2022 by The Bookwyrm

[SymphonianBookworm she/her]

It's amazing that things like this exist. We go about our everyday lives, thinking about how embarrassed we are that we were accidentally unmuted on a formal zoom call definitely didn't happen to me and we forget how small we are. Look at the stars... just look. And then you can see so much. I'm not an astronomy nerd, but I love to read and write about beautiful things, and this... this has made me pause. It's really, really wondrous. Symohnian. Complex. Beautiful. Things like this exist out in the world....

[The Bookwyrm he/him]

There are some secret images they didn't tell us about!

These first ones are of Jupiter and some of its moons.

These ones are neat, because you can actually make out Jupiter's rings, especially in the one on the right. (The one on the right is in Mid-Infrared, while the one on the left is in Near-Infrared.) Also, on the image on the left, you can see Europa's shadow directly to the left of the Great Red Spot. It's a little solar eclipse.

This one was a gif, apparently, I didn't know that. It shows an asteroid known as 6481 Tenzing moving across a background of stars.

These ones look a little less impressive than the ones I showed you above, but the science we can do with these images and the things we can learn are just as spectacular. These new images also go to show how versatile JWST is; it can peer from the farthest galaxies to the closest planets. It just makes me more excited about what we're going to learn from this telescope.

 

And, this last one isn't a JWST image, but I thought it fit:

 

[CrypticSpren he/him]

I had no idea about the Jupiter and the Tenzing pictures! I'm sure that with the right filters these pictures would look just as impressive. I'm very new to astronomy, but it's kinda insane the sheer range in physical space that JWST can take pictures of (as close as Jupiter and however many billion lightyears the microlensed galaxies in the deep field are).

[The Bookwyrm he/him]

A new image has been released, and this one is of a galaxy known as NGC 628, Messier 74 or the Phantom Galaxy.

There was another version of the image that had more or a purple hue, so I'm assuming that this one is in a different wavelength than that one. (I don't know which one is the near-infrared and which one is the mid-infrared, sorry.)

I don't really know what kind of science they're going to be able to do with an image like this, but it just goes to show how incredible and amazing the detail that Webb can produce is. Most of what we see in this image is the gas and dust that makes the skeleton of the galaxy, and that's easier to see in infrared wavelengths, which is what Webb is equipped for.

I'll admit, when I first heard that Webb was going to be an infrared telescope, I was kind of disappointed, because I for some silly reason thought infrared was boring. But now that I see and understand exactly what that allows the telescope to see, I'm so glad that they went with it.

For some clarification, Webb has two primary cameras: MIRI, and NIRCam.

NIRCam is designed to see in the Near-Infrared (as you could probably guess by the name). Near-infrared light is light that's closer to light in the visible spectrum that we can see. Infrared light probably has a bunch of different colors in it, just not colors that we can comprehend. Near-infrared light is going to be higher on the spectrum than other infrared light, meaning it has more energy and is easier to detect.

MIRI stands for Mid-InfraRed Instrument. Mid-Infrared light is near the center of the infrared spectrum (which, I should add, is much larger than the visible spectrum). It holds less energy and allows us to see different things than what Near-Infrared light will show us.

Many of the side by side images I've shown above are just a NIRCam image and a MIRI image shown together, but some of the more detailed images are a composite of data gathered by both cameras, overlapped and filtered to create a spectacular vista.

Edited July 22, 2022 by The Bookwyrm

[Thaidakar the Ghostblood he/him]

I love these pictures! I've always been fascinated by astronomy.

[StormingTexan he/him]

The images are truly amazing!  I saw this side by side comparison of Hubble vs. JWST on Reddit and thought it was pretty cool. Really excited about what we will see next. 

[Medium he/they]

space is soooo coooool

[Shining Silhouette he/him]

Did you guys see that one image that the French physicist Étienne Klein posted of Proxima Centauri taken by JWST?!

Spoiler

He trolled us all. He admitted that this is actually a closeup of a chorizo 

Also, check out this photo of the Cartwheel galaxy! This is spectacular!!

 

[The Bookwyrm he/him]

Here's a new, more detailed picture of Jupiter that we get from JWST.

You can see incredible detail in the clouds, and places with high pressures and temperatures, which glow in the infrared light.

You can also see the planet's aurora's at the north and south poles.

This telescope isn't just for deep space science, as it turns out!

[The Wandering Wizard he/him]

1 minute ago, The Bookwyrm said:

Here's a new, more detailed picture of Jupiter that we get from JWST.

You can see incredible detail in the clouds, and places with high pressures and temperatures, which glow in the infrared light.

You can also see the planet's aurora's at the north and south poles.

This telescope isn't just for deep space science, as it turns out!

That is so cool! I hope we get to see more of other planets eventually.

[Thaidakar the Ghostblood he/him]

On 8/22/2022 at 6:58 AM, The Bookwyrm said:

Here's a new, more detailed picture of Jupiter that we get from JWST.

You can see incredible detail in the clouds, and places with high pressures and temperatures, which glow in the infrared light.

You can also see the planet's aurora's at the north and south poles.

This telescope isn't just for deep space science, as it turns out!

Jupiter looks sick.

[The Bookwyrm he/him]

JWST has directly imaged an exoplanet!

This is a planetary system about 355 light years from Sol. (If you want to give our solar system a sci-fi-ey name.) The exoplanet is directly imaged, meaning that this is an actual photograph of HIP 65426 b itself. It orbits farther from its star than Neptune does from our own.

This is really neat, and while I don't yet know what science they're going to do with this capability, I can't wait to find out.

[Medium he/they]

Y'all seen this yet?

This is the original MRI-instrumentation-taken photo of a cartwheel galaxy as seen by the JWST.

Looks siiiiiiick