James Webb Space Telescope (2 Viewers)

Previous Next
Last edited:
fred8615 said:
www.livescience.com

James Webb telescope watches ancient supernova replay 3 times — and confirms something is seriously wrong in our understanding of the universe

The James Webb Space Telescope has zoomed in on an ancient supernova, revealing fresh evidence that a crisis in cosmology called the Hubble tension isn't going anywhere soon.
www.livescience.com www.livescience.com
Click to expand...


Seriously, though, we may indeed never know because our perspective due to our physical place in the universe (from which we have no other choice from which view it) may simply always give us skewed information due to things in the universe (which we might never discover) affecting the data before it reaches us.
 
As the finger-like celestial objects seem to grasp into the heavens, the Pillars of Creation are almost impossible to adequately describe with human language. Located in Eagle Nebula in the Serpens constellation, the clusters of cool interstellar gas and dust appear splotchy in the Hubble Space Telescope's images, but thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the Pillars truly appear like solid columns.

With a normal earthbound telescope, one can only see the Serpens constellation in the northern part of the celestial hemisphere. The breathtaking beauty of the Pillars, which humanity can now appreciate in even finer detail, only became evident to those whose eyes turned toward the heavens within the last few years.

This is just one of many gifts the JWST has bestowed on humanity. One of the biggest fans of the next gen telescop is Ethan Siegel, a theoretical astrophysicist who used to teach at the academic level, but today most people know him for his work outside of the classroom as a science writer, especially his writing about space. Siegel's new book, "Infinite Cosmos: Visions From the James Webb Space Telescope," was released on Oct. 8th.

Good science writing is a fine balancing act between not speaking over the heads of laypeople and not insulting the intelligence of experts. Siegel achieves that whether explaining inflation prior to the Big Bang or penning a book on humanity's lifelong quest to understand the universe beyond our solar system, Siegel is adept at breaking down complex concepts in compelling yet accessible prose. In the past he has spoken with Salon about everything from debunking UFO hoaxes to understanding Dyson spheres.

Salon spoke with Siegel about how the JWST has challenged dominant theories about cosmology, consistently presenting mind-boggling images that defy explanation, as well as why space is for everyone, regardless of political affiliation or creed.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Which images from this book are your personal favorites?

From a visual point of view, there are a number of stunning ones. I absolutely love the JWST [James Webb Space Telescope] images of the Pillars of Creation. We have pictures of the telescope while it was under construction as well. There is a picture of the ISIM module, which is the Integrated Science Instrument Module. This is a part of the telescope you don't normally see. It is gold in color, so it isn't just the JWST team mirror that's gold, but the instrument module itself is also gold. And I was really excited to get to see that, because that was a surprising one to me...............

This then goes back to the question of, "What are the major achievements of this particular telescope? Can you explain how James Webb is a breakthrough compared to other telescopes that have been developed?"

For one thing, it is the largest, most sensitive space observatory ever built, and because of that, it has required new technologies that never existed before. It was designed and built — such as the folding segmented mirror, such as the five-layer sunshield and such as the science instruments that are onboarded — all of those represent newly-developed technologies. And because of that, because we have a new telescope with larger aperture, high-precision sensitive wavelengths and new instruments, we were able to discover a whole slew of new things about the universe that we never knew before.


These include the most distant galaxy cluster; it includes classes of objects like what we call JuMBOs, which stands for "Jupiter Mass Binary Objects." We saw star forming regions where you will have stars that form and planets form around them. We did not know we would find giant planets forming without parents stars at all, much less that we would see giant stars forming in pairs or binary systems with no stars at all. One of the most fascinating things that JWST has shown us, that I'm excited we do get to talk about in the book, is that around a nearby young star, a star called Fomalhaut, we don't see just an analogy of the solar system where you have planets and an asteroid belt and more planets and a hyper belt. We found in that system that there is a third belt, there is an intermediate belt in there. We never saw an intermediate belt before. We did not know that such things could exist.


And now we have to rethink our story about how planets and planetary systems form is our solar system typical or is the Fomalhaut system typical? We don't even know anymore, what is the most common configuration for planetary systems in the universe?..............

www.salon.com

Why the James Webb Space Telescope has been a gift to humanity

Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel explained why government investments have made great scientific discoveries possible
www.salon.com www.salon.com
 
The James Webb Space Telescope has directly imaged its lowest mass extrasolar planet outside the solar system yet. The planet is also the closest to its star to be directly observed by the $10 billion space telescope.

The imaging was a "race against time" with the extrasolar planet, or "exoplanet," about to disappear behind the blinding light of its parent star, perhaps for as long as a decade.

The planet AF Leporis b (AF Lep b) is no stranger to setting records. In 2023, this extrasolar planet, or "exoplanet," became the lowest-mass planet beyond the solar system to be discovered by direct observation. It then became the lowest-mass world to have its mass measured by "astrometry," a technique that monitors the motion of a star over many years to identify "wobbles" caused by the gravitational tug of an orbiting planet.

AF Lep b is a young exoplanet estimated to be just 23 million years old. If that sounds ancient, consider that the Earth is estimated to be 4.6 billion years old. AF Lep b has a mass around 3.2 times that of Jupiter and a width around 1.2 times that of the solar system gas giant.

"AF Lep b is right at the inner edge of being detectable. Even though it is extraordinarily sensitive, JWST is smaller than our largest telescopes on the ground," University of Texas at Austin researcher Kyle Franson said in a statement. "And we’re observing at longer wavelengths, which has the effect of making objects look fuzzier. It becomes difficult to separate one source from another when they appear so close together."

Yet, because it is 88 light-years from Earth, AF Lep b still appears to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) as little more than a speck. Fortunately, astronomers can learn a heck of a lot from such a "speck."

Since the discovery of the first exoplanet in the 1990s, the exoplanet catalog has burgeoned to over 6,000 entries, with thousands more to be confirmed. Yet, very few of these have been directly imaged.

Most exoplanets are detected via their effect on their host star, either when they block light as they cross the face of their star or from gravitational tugs they exert on that star............

 
Optimus Prime said:
As the finger-like celestial objects seem to grasp into the heavens, the Pillars of Creation are almost impossible to adequately describe with human language. Located in Eagle Nebula in the Serpens constellation, the clusters of cool interstellar gas and dust appear splotchy in the Hubble Space Telescope's images, but thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the Pillars truly appear like solid columns.

With a normal earthbound telescope, one can only see the Serpens constellation in the northern part of the celestial hemisphere. The breathtaking beauty of the Pillars, which humanity can now appreciate in even finer detail, only became evident to those whose eyes turned toward the heavens within the last few years.

This is just one of many gifts the JWST has bestowed on humanity. One of the biggest fans of the next gen telescop is Ethan Siegel, a theoretical astrophysicist who used to teach at the academic level, but today most people know him for his work outside of the classroom as a science writer, especially his writing about space. Siegel's new book, "Infinite Cosmos: Visions From the James Webb Space Telescope," was released on Oct. 8th.

Good science writing is a fine balancing act between not speaking over the heads of laypeople and not insulting the intelligence of experts. Siegel achieves that whether explaining inflation prior to the Big Bang or penning a book on humanity's lifelong quest to understand the universe beyond our solar system, Siegel is adept at breaking down complex concepts in compelling yet accessible prose. In the past he has spoken with Salon about everything from debunking UFO hoaxes to understanding Dyson spheres.

Salon spoke with Siegel about how the JWST has challenged dominant theories about cosmology, consistently presenting mind-boggling images that defy explanation, as well as why space is for everyone, regardless of political affiliation or creed.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Which images from this book are your personal favorites?

From a visual point of view, there are a number of stunning ones. I absolutely love the JWST [James Webb Space Telescope] images of the Pillars of Creation. We have pictures of the telescope while it was under construction as well. There is a picture of the ISIM module, which is the Integrated Science Instrument Module. This is a part of the telescope you don't normally see. It is gold in color, so it isn't just the JWST team mirror that's gold, but the instrument module itself is also gold. And I was really excited to get to see that, because that was a surprising one to me...............

This then goes back to the question of, "What are the major achievements of this particular telescope? Can you explain how James Webb is a breakthrough compared to other telescopes that have been developed?"

For one thing, it is the largest, most sensitive space observatory ever built, and because of that, it has required new technologies that never existed before. It was designed and built — such as the folding segmented mirror, such as the five-layer sunshield and such as the science instruments that are onboarded — all of those represent newly-developed technologies. And because of that, because we have a new telescope with larger aperture, high-precision sensitive wavelengths and new instruments, we were able to discover a whole slew of new things about the universe that we never knew before.


These include the most distant galaxy cluster; it includes classes of objects like what we call JuMBOs, which stands for "Jupiter Mass Binary Objects." We saw star forming regions where you will have stars that form and planets form around them. We did not know we would find giant planets forming without parents stars at all, much less that we would see giant stars forming in pairs or binary systems with no stars at all. One of the most fascinating things that JWST has shown us, that I'm excited we do get to talk about in the book, is that around a nearby young star, a star called Fomalhaut, we don't see just an analogy of the solar system where you have planets and an asteroid belt and more planets and a hyper belt. We found in that system that there is a third belt, there is an intermediate belt in there. We never saw an intermediate belt before. We did not know that such things could exist.


And now we have to rethink our story about how planets and planetary systems form is our solar system typical or is the Fomalhaut system typical? We don't even know anymore, what is the most common configuration for planetary systems in the universe?..............

www.salon.com

Why the James Webb Space Telescope has been a gift to humanity

Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel explained why government investments have made great scientific discoveries possible
www.salon.com www.salon.com
Click to expand...
Thanks for the “feel lucky and grateful for selfish geeky things” reminder:

- Grandkids? Check
- Saints win a Super Bowl? Check
- Remembering how the moon landing (and Apollo 13) felt? Check
- And, incredible images from JWST? Check!
 
HoustonSaint68 said:
Thanks for the “feel lucky and grateful for selfish geeky things” reminder:

- Grandkids? Check
- Saints win a Super Bowl? Check
- Remembering how the moon landing (and Apollo 13) felt? Check
- And, incredible images from JWST? Check!
Click to expand...
Not to kill your buzz, but at least three of those four are allegedly conspiracies.
 
Consigliere said:
Not to kill your buzz, but at least three of those four are allegedly conspiracies.
Click to expand...
Well, four actually. You know the saying, “Mama’s baby, daddy’s maybe 🤔”.

Hard to say for sure with my ex-wife involved :hihi:
 
It is a major goal of astronomical research to find planets other than Earth that might be suitable for sustaining life. There are a number of factors which many scientists agree are essential to a planet being habitable, but an important one is whether or not a planet has an atmosphere.

Scientists have found other rocky, Earth-like exoplanets, but none that we can definitively say have atmospheres. Finding these planets will reveal insights into how such atmospheres are formed and retained, so that we can better predict which planets could be habitable.

A study conducted by University of Chicago Ph.D. student Qiao Xue with Prof. Jacob Bean's group has demonstrated a new way to determine if faraway exoplanets have an atmosphere—and showed that it was simpler and more efficient than previous methods.

The new technique, when applied to more planets, has the potential to help us learn more about patterns in atmosphere formation. The paper is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"When we look at a large enough data set, as we will this year with the James Webb Space Telescope, we are hoping to find trends to help us understand more about atmosphere formation—and what makes planets habitable," said Xue.

As scientists try to understand the conditions on other faraway planets, they would like to know whether or not a planet has an atmosphere—a gaseous layer that insulates the planet and regulates its temperature. On Earth, for example, our atmosphere redistributes the sun's heat around the planet, keeping it a temperate place for life.

Scientists cannot, however, directly image rocky, Earth-like planets close to their stars. Instead, they must piece together different clues, such as the fluctuations in light as the planet moves around its host star.

In the study, the scientists used a method that was proposed in 2019 by a collaboration including Bean and Megan Mansfield (Ph.D.'21, now with the University of Arizona) to look for atmospheres. The approach uses the difference in temperature between an exoplanet measured at its hottest and the calculated temperature of how hot it could theoretically be.

Since atmospheres disperse heat around the entire surface area of planets, they reduce the temperature of the hottest side of the planet (which faces the star directly). The scientists hypothesized that if an exoplanet's actual temperature is not as hot as it could theoretically be, then we can presume it has an atmosphere performing this function.

The trouble was, however, that we have lacked instruments precise enough to provide accurate enough readings for these temperatures. The James Webb Space Telescope has changed that—offering an increased capacity to see in the infrared, which allows for scientists to record the temperatures of the planets by measuring the intensity of energy they emit.

When exoplanets cross in front of their suns, they obscure some of the star's light, leading to a slight decrease in the star's measured brightness. When the planet appears almost behind the star relative to our viewing devices, we can capture the maximum brightness of the system—that is, the unobscured star combined with the comparatively minimal light emitted from the planet...........

phys.org

Webb allows researchers to use new method of finding atmospheres in distant planets

It is a major goal of astronomical research to find planets other than Earth that might be suitable for sustaining life. There are a number of factors which many scientists agree are essential to a planet being habitable, but an important one is whether or not a planet has an atmosphere.
phys.org phys.org
 

Create an account or login to comment

You must be a member in order to leave a comment

Create account

Create an account on our community. It's easy!

Register

Log in

Already have an account? Log in here.

Previous Next

Users who are viewing this thread

    Total: 3 (members: 0, guests: 3)

    Share this page

     

    Twitter

    Back
    Top Bottom