Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Webb telescope - first images

Absolutely incredible images coming from the Webb telescope.

This image represents 16 light years across !!!

Mind blowing, check more HERE as they load them up

Looking forward to the BBC2 programme on Thursday evening (after last night's prog on BBC4 about Hubble).

As an amateur astronomer, this fascinates me. The Webb looked at a tiny cross section of sky and found thousands of galaxies, dating back to 13.7 million light years, just a small time after the Big Bang, approximately 14 billion years ago. That the furthest we have ever seen. Truly astounding.

That was about the time that I put last Christmas's turkey on to cook, it should be ready soon.....

It is all very wonderful, but how do we know that the images are "real" and not enhanced for visual effect?
They remind me of some of the images from the Star Trek movies...

The images are of what's actually there ... but not what you'd see with the naked eye ... they're largely in various parts of the infra-red spectrum ... lower frequencies than our eyes can pick up.

So in one sense, as images, they're not real ... in that you wouldn't see what's in them even if you strolled across the vastness of space to take a look with your own eyes ... however, the Human eye isn't the be all and end all of perception so they're a genuine rendering of what's there ... just not what we'd see.

K

Here you can compare shots of Hubble vs. JWST.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/12/...scope-first-images-vs-hubbles-epic-shots

It is a bit unfair to say that James Webb does not film in the visible range and therefore takes "unnatural pictures". In reality, only the escape velocity of the space expansion is compensated. It is infrared today as it arrives with us but the "true light" was exactly in the visible range which is recalibrated today if we would have seen the same objects from the proximity at that time.

In my view, the JWST is one of the greatest projects of our time, and what luck that everything has worked out so far so well.
We are at the very beginning. Hubble has opened our eyes for 30 years, and that will be much more the case now...along with all the other wavelength and gravitational wave detectors that will also soon detect much lower and higher frequencies than Ligo alone can.

Quite agree Heinz. Absolutely fascinating!

Hubble sees primarily ultraviolet and visible light and lacks the capability to explore the periods when the first luminous objects formed - known as the Cosmic Dark Ages. To see this we need a telescope exquisitely sensitive to infrared light. As Heinz points out, because the Universe is still expanding, the farther away something is the faster its receding from us. Because light travels at a finite speed, the expansion stretches lights wavelength (red shifts) into the infrared. The further away an object, the more red shifted it is into the infrared spectrum. Webb was designed to address this issue. Its 20 foot primary mirror and infrared wavelength sensitivity enables us to look further back in time than ever before, almost to the cusp of the Big Bang. A time machine, in effect.

Webb is a marvellous machine. It will explore not only the frontiers of cosmology but is also designed to "sniff" the atmospheres of exoplanets, perhaps detecting the chemistry that makes life possible.

Expect many more revelations.

I agree, David. And in addition it is not generally known that the expansion of the universe from one "end" to the other (or better said, from two distant points to each other) is meanwhile much faster than the speed of light. The speed of light is the speed limit "in" space. The expansion concerns the space itself, therefore it comes relatively to strong superluminal speed. In a certain future we would see nothing more except the stars of the local groups of galaxies, where the gravity still prevails. From this point of view we live in a phase of numerous information which will remain in darkness later, forever. Ok, not in our lifetime.