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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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]
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).
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!
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
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.
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.
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]
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):
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)
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
[+] [-] Temporal_Trout|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wolfd|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] skrause|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darzu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cbm-vic-20|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kye|3 years ago|reply
Since I don't, I made a poster of crops: https://twitter.com/KyeFox/status/1546629778349907968
[+] [-] noisy_boy|3 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] zamadatix|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qbasic_forever|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noisy_boy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alionaguseva|3 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] igorv|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lamontcg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|3 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] mtlmtlmtlmtl|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pkaye|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ehsankia|3 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] hengistbury|3 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] mgdlbp|3 years ago|reply
(like https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:16042014_Bokeh.jpg, https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/52126)
[+] [-] mwattsun|3 years ago|reply
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-...
[+] [-] prpl|3 years ago|reply
It’s mostly different astrophysics but still - it’s astrophysics
[+] [-] perihelions|3 years ago|reply
- "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")
[+] [-] SomeHacker44|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aimor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kumarvvr|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dav_Oz|3 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] 2bitencryption|3 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] perihelions|3 years ago|reply
(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)
[+] [-] colechristensen|3 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] el_nahual|3 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] groffee|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cwkoss|3 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] mabbo|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mannerheim|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prox|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jungturk|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation
[+] [-] jaaron|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] perihelions|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darzu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unzadunza|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sharkweek|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] belter|3 years ago|reply
https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/countdown.html
[+] [-] nabla9|3 years ago|reply
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Hersch...
[+] [-] axg11|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] justinc-md|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] de6u99er|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sylens|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] b0sk|3 years ago|reply