1st image of James Webb Space telescope(JWST)

[J.Quondam]

The Morning After: The 68GB SSD floating inside the James Webb Space Telescope

There’s a 68GB SSD floating inside the James Webb Space Telescope, US Congress calls for the FTC to regulate how VPN companies operate, UK forces Meta to halt its forced sale of Giphy.

www.engadget.com

When I was a college astro student in the mid 1990s, a new telescope came online. The researchers in the group wondered, "Our instrument is going to generate over ONE GIG of data per night! Where will we store it all???"

Things have come a loooooong a way in the last 30 years.


* Also: Holy mackerel! It's going on 30 years already?!?!?

 

[Ryujin]

The Morning After: The 68GB SSD floating inside the James Webb Space Telescope

There’s a 68GB SSD floating inside the James Webb Space Telescope, US Congress calls for the FTC to regulate how VPN companies operate, UK forces Meta to halt its forced sale of Giphy.

www.engadget.com

More of a transmission buffer, than a storage device.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Lots of photos around the web(b) these days showing spectacular nerd space sci-fi naughty word on Webb's images... It gets kinda repetitive, but I guess it represents our desire to really see something immediately exciting and maybe get out of our daily life and concerns...

I am certainly hoping for something exciting about planets - but also about anything new in terms of galactic structures, (indirect) dark matter observations and what not...

 

[tomBitonti]

Another way to compare Hubble to Webb images:

Webb Compare

www.webbcompare.com

In the "Galaxy Cluster SMACS 0723" view ... I'm noticing a number of galaxies (I presume) which are at best barely visible in the Hubble image. For example, there are a number of these which are prominent in the JWST image in the upper right hand corner. Does anyone have additional information about what these are? If they are more distant than what is visible in the Hubble image, how much more distant?

Tom Bitonti

 

[trappedslider]

Someone threw a rock at it >_<

Micrometeoroid damage to James Webb Space Telescope imaged for first time

The damage to NASA's flagship observatory was significantly greater than pre-launch expectations

astronomy.com

 

[J.Quondam]

In the "Galaxy Cluster SMACS 0723" view ... I'm noticing a number of galaxies (I presume) which are at best barely visible in the Hubble image. For example, there are a number of these which are prominent in the JWST image in the upper right hand corner. Does anyone have additional information about what these are? If they are more distant than what is visible in the Hubble image, how much more distant?

Tom Bitonti

I believe most of those are very distant, very red-shifted, very young galaxies.
Webb is about 7x bigger than Hubble, so it can just see fainter things with shorter exposure times. But I believe the main reason Webb but not Hubble sees them is because Webb detects longer wavelengths of infrared, so it sees redder objects-- including very distant, very red-shifted galaxies.
As for numbers, the foreground SMACS 0723 cluster is apparently around 4.6 billion years old (and in distance terms, I believe that means it's pretty close to 4.6 billion LY away). The most distant of those red ones in the background are up to 13 billion years old (but i'm not sure how that translates to distance).

I know there are some real astronomers, etc, around here who could probably correct/expand on any of this!

Here's NASA's PR on the image:

NASA’s Webb Delivers Deepest Infrared Image of Universe Yet - NASA

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has produced the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date. Known as Webb’s First Deep Field, this image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 is overflowing with detail.

www.nasa.gov

 

[Dioltach]

Someone threw a rock at it >_<

Micrometeoroid damage to James Webb Space Telescope imaged for first time

The damage to NASA's flagship observatory was significantly greater than pre-launch expectations

astronomy.com

Seems like someone doesn't want us to see what they're up to ...

 

[Davies]

Seems like someone doesn't want us to see what they're up to ...

Eh. With that level of impact, it's more of a 'notice me senpai!' gesture than that. If they really wanted to make sure we couldn't see them, they'd have sent something on the scale of Chicxulub.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I believe most of those are very distant, very red-shifted, very young galaxies.T
Webb is about 7x bigger than Hubble, so it can just see fainter things with shorter exposure times. But I believe the main reason Webb but not Hubble sees them is because Webb detects longer wavelengths of infrared, so it sees redder objects-- including very distant, very red-shifted galaxies.
As for numbers, the foreground SMACS 0723 cluster is apparently around 4.6 billion years old (and in distance terms, I believe that means it's pretty close to 4.6 billion LY away). The most distant of those red ones in the background are up to 13 billion years old (but i'm not sure how that translates to distance).

I know there are some real astronomers, etc, around here who could probably correct/expand on any of this!

Here's NASA's PR on the image:

NASA’s Webb Delivers Deepest Infrared Image of Universe Yet - NASA

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has produced the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date. Known as Webb’s First Deep Field, this image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 is overflowing with detail.

www.nasa.gov

I am not sure how far it was actually when the light spend 4.6 billion light years to get to us. At the time it left its origin, I think it would have been closer than 4.6 billion light years away, but due to the expansion of the universe, the distance the light needed to travel was actually 4.6 billion light years. And of course, since then, the object moved further away from us, too, so it's definitely not 4.6 billion light years away from us now, either. It might be now so far away that the light leaving it now will never reach us.

This can be all quite confusing.

Not an astronomer.

 

[Stalker0]

800 years ago, the rich and the educated planned and funded projects (gothic cathedrals) the completion of which they knew would not happen within their own lifetime. They did so regardlessly, and we still marvel at the results of their efforts almost a millennium later.
Why don't we (society, politicians) have the guts anymore to do such things? Tackle something so big it exceeds the sum of its individual parts? It saddens me that our thinking has shrunk so much...

It's an interesting question, I mean our pace of construction is so quick we can build a LOT in your 80+ year timespan. What engineering marvel could we conceive of that would take longer than that? Human Genome project took only about 13-15 years. 3 Georges Dam was 17 years. Probably the new "Millenium Clock" might be the closest to a classic wonder of the world under construction, a clock designed to keep accurate time for 10,000 years. But again, most of the difficulties in that project are conceptual, how do we actually do this accurate timekeeping. The construction will take a while, but longer than 80+ years, probably not.

A lot of our challenges now are more conceptual than they are the simple pace of construction. Take the space elevator concept, the problem isn't the time to build it (once we got things moving we could easily complete it in 20 year time timespans), its the fact that we don't know how...no material we have could do the job, we literally need to science up something new.

A common multigenerational challenge is the "generational starship", the idea of sending humans across multiple generations to another planet. But first we have to find one that would fit the bill, and we haven't found Earth 2 yet. Maybe the James Webb Telescope will help with that.