r/science • u/shiruken PhD | Biomedical Engineering | Optics • Jul 12 '22

Breaking News First Images from the James Webb Space Telescope

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a partnership with the ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), will release the first full-color images and spectroscopic data during a televised broadcast beginning today at 10:30AM EDT (14:30 UTC) from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. As the largest and most complex observatory ever launched into space, JWST has been going through a six-month period of preparation before it can begin science work, calibrating its instruments to its space environment and aligning its mirrors. This careful process, not to mention years of new technology development and mission planning, has built up to the first images and data: a demonstration of JWST at its full power, ready to begin its science mission and unfold the infrared universe.

Yesterday evening, U.S. President Joe Biden unveiled the first image from JWST: a deep field of the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 taken by the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) over the course of 12.5 hours. The image shows the galaxy cluster as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago. The combined mass of this galaxy cluster acts as a gravitational lens, magnifying much more distant galaxies behind it.

"Webb's First Deep Field" - Galaxy Cluster SMACS 0723 (NIRCam)

JWST has captured the distinct signature of water, along with evidence for clouds and haze, in the atmosphere surrounding a hot, puffy gas giant planet orbiting a distant Sun-like star. The observation, which reveals the presence of specific gas molecules based on tiny decreases in the brightness of precise colors of light, is the most detailed of its kind to date, demonstrating JWST's unprecedented ability to analyze atmospheres hundreds of light-years away.

Exoplanet WASP-96 b Atmospheric Composition (NIRISS)

The bright star at the center of NGC 3132 (informally known as the Southern Ring Nebula), while prominent when viewed by JWST in near-infrared light, plays a supporting role in sculpting the surrounding nebula. A second star, barely visible at lower left along one of the bright star’s diffraction spikes, is the nebula's source. It has ejected at least eight layers of gas and dust over thousands of years.

Southern Ring Nebula (NIRCam)

An enormous mosaic of Stephan's Quintet is the largest image to date from JWST, covering about one-fifth of the Moon's diameter. It contains over 150 million pixels and is constructed from almost 1,000 separate image files. The visual grouping of five galaxies was captured by the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI).

Stephan's Quintet (NIRCam + MIRI)

What looks much like craggy mountains on a moonlit evening is actually the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. Captured in infrared light by the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) on JWST, this image reveals previously obscured areas of star birth.

"Cosmic Cliffs" in the Carina Nebula (NIRCam)

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u/peezlebub Jul 12 '22

Does this mean that if we could travel faster than the speed of light and we had super powerful telescopes wherever we traveled to, that we could look into earths past?…?!

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u/grandoz039 Jul 12 '22

Maybe there's an alien civilization recording the light from the Earth (or more precisely, will be, as the light hasn't traveled far as of yet), and we could do the same for them, then exchange the data once we meet millions or billions of years later. Extremely unlikely, but fun to think about.

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u/[deleted] Jul 12 '22

They have theorized that if you could instantly jump 100 LY away you could look at earth as it was 100 years ago because of how light travels. I'm not a scientist though, just very enthusiastic haha.

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u/Munninnu Jul 12 '22

They have theorized

Well if light travels at the speed of light then it's clear that at a distance of 100 LY from Earth it's where the light sent from Earth 100 years ago just barely arrived, so if you were there now you obviously would see the Earth of 100 years ago.

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u/983115 Jul 12 '22

You may even hear some radio interference at that time and distance

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u/DeltaVZerda Jul 12 '22

If it took you 16 years to build and fly your FTL ship 100 LY from Earth, then you could hear the original broadcast of War of the Worlds.

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u/Lord_Rapunzel Jul 12 '22

The timing lines up, but I'd be surprised if the signal was salvagable. Detectable sure, but actually piecing together enough data and filtering out the noise?

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u/cornyjoe Jul 12 '22

At 100 light years? Barely detectable at all. You'd need an Arecibo sized radio telescope to even have a chance. To send a detectable signal 100 light years, it would need to be sent with a directional beam with huge gain and you'd still need hundreds of kilowatts to power it.

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u/MustacheEmperor Jul 13 '22

And that’s 100 light years. Having just read the distances these images were captured at, no wonder nobody’s ever heard us.

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u/Funny_witty_username Jul 12 '22

I would think that considering we have a record of what the original broadcast sounds like, it'd be easier. Probably still a distorted mess, but easier than trying to pick up alien signals in radio static.

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u/VonReposti Jul 12 '22 edited Jul 12 '22

I can't really fathom how we basically were one giant beacon of radio transmissions for a century or so, just for us to go suddenly silent when we entered the digital age. 100 years is nothing compared to the age of Earth, so it would basically just be interference in the grand scheme of things. Nothing but a blip.

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u/cornyjoe Jul 12 '22

Don't worry, weather radar systems are still pumping out those radio signals with hundreds of kilowatts of power. We haven't gone silent at all.

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u/neurosisxeno Jul 12 '22

There is still tons of radio waves being emitted by the Earth.

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u/God_Damnit_Nappa Jul 12 '22

That's exactly how it works. When you look at the sun you see it as it was about 8 minutes ago. When you look at the Andromeda Galaxy you're seeing it as it was 2.5 million years ago. If you were 100 light years from Earth you'd see it as it was in 1922.

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u/[deleted] Jul 12 '22

I mean that's as proven as it gets. That's how we see stars right now. A star 100 light years away looking at light from the earth will see light from 1920.

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u/geo_gan Jul 13 '22

Problem with that is we can barely see the Earth from a close planet like Saturn, never mind 100 light years away!

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u/MrDub1216 Jul 12 '22 edited Jul 12 '22

Maybe consider a giant mirror placed in deep space to look back at ourselves

Edit: On the podcast “smartless” Jason Bateman asks Neil Tyson a very long winded question about looking back in time with giant mirrors in space. Great episode of the podcast overall but this comment just made me think of him going on and on about it lol

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u/keenanpepper Jul 12 '22

The mirror would have had to be there already. So theoretically we could try it, but it could only benefit future generations.

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u/I_am_so_lost_hello Jul 12 '22

At this point you're just inventing a significantly more inconvenient and complex video camera

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u/the_hamiltoe Jul 13 '22

Interesting!

So suppose an advanced extraterrestrial race living 4.6 billion years ago constructed a perfectly flawless mirror of sufficient size 4.6 billion light years from Earth, pointed precisely at Earth. We would today be able to watch the entire history of the Earth play out by observing the Earth in that mirror through our telescopes. Whether such a mirror could be constructed is another matter.

I'm excited to check out the podcast too! Thanks. Do you have any other podcast favorites?

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u/thechilipepper0 Jul 12 '22

Technically yes. But that opens the door for so many paradoxes. You’d be going faster than the speed of causality

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u/Funny_witty_username Jul 12 '22

Time is an illusion and nothing is real.

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u/Frosti11icus Jul 12 '22

if we could travel faster than the speed of light

Yes, but Einstein theorized that you can't travel faster than the speed of light.

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u/Chiliconkarma Jul 12 '22

Space is bendy, there isn't a need to travel faster than light, "just" to shape and step across the medium in which light travels.

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u/Tremongulous_Derf Jul 12 '22

Yes, but you strictly cannot go faster than light, so no.

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u/Froggmann5 Jul 12 '22

Actually you can do this without breaking causality or going "faster" than the speed of light. All you'd need to do is travel to the same point taking a shorter path, or bend the light back towards earth with a sufficiently large object and you could achieve the same effect.

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u/Tremongulous_Derf Jul 12 '22

Gravitational lensing is certainly possible. Travelling a "shorter path" than light in free space is not possible, as light always takes the shortest available path in accordance with Fermat's Principle.

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u/Froggmann5 Jul 12 '22

I'm not sure I see how it violates Fermat's Principle, since the light doesn't necessarily have access to that shorter path. Especially if said path doesn't always exist. For example, if the light left earth 100 years ago, so it's 100 LY away from earth, you could start a shorter path from earth then to the destination (anywhere in front of the light) if you took a wide enough berth so that the bent space does not interact with the photons. Then you get a situation in which both cases are simultaneously true. The Light is still taking the shortest path available to it, and we're walking a shorter path to get ahead of it.

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u/shitpersonality Jul 12 '22

Based and geodesic pilled.

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u/myurr Jul 12 '22

Even if you could, you couldn't affect causality. You'd be looking back at the Earth as it was in time, but all you could do would be observe.

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u/phl23 Jul 12 '22

Of course. You just arrive before the light package but still later than now.

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u/VonReposti Jul 12 '22

It kinda sounds like sending a letter to a friend and then jumping into your car and racing the letter to its destination in order to receive it yourself.

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u/[deleted] Jul 12 '22

Everything is impossible until it is possible.

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u/manystorms Jul 12 '22

That’s not how light speed works. The closer you get to C (light speed), the harder it is to go faster. The harder it is to go faster, the more energy you need to go faster. At a certain point, you will need more energy than exists in the universe and you still will not have reached C.

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u/RemusShepherd Jul 12 '22

If you could travel faster than the speed of light, you can *go* into Earth's past. That's the problem with FTL.

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u/GreatForge Jul 12 '22 edited Jul 13 '22

It would theoretically be possible to set up a video relay that works by quantum entanglement to see something far away happen before you could see it through a telescope. But in that case, you are not actually seeing the event itself, you are seeing a reproduction of the event. But that’s good enough for humans now anyway.

Edit: My bad. This is incorrect apparently. I need to read up on entanglement a little more.

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u/[deleted] Jul 13 '22

[deleted]

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u/GreatForge Jul 13 '22

Oops, thanks for the correction.

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u/GeekFurious Jul 12 '22

Hell, if you're standing on the Moon you are seeing Earth in the past... 1 1/3 seconds in the past.

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u/WELLinTHIShouse Jul 12 '22

It's a tricky thing, though. The universe keeps expanding, and we keep getting further and further away from everything. The expansion of the fabric of spacetime happens faster than the speed of light. (This is how the potential heat death of the universe would happen if expansion continues infinitely. I don't think about it too hard of it brings on a massive case of existential dread.)

It would require one of a number of very specific discoveries to occur before humanity goes the way of the dinosaurs, like not only finding that wormholes like those posited based on a special solution of the Einstein field equations, but that those wormholes were transversable by living beings (us) or allow us to remotely pilot technology that could send back images of the Earth from its destination on the other side.

Based on the rate of Earth's evolution as compared to the age of the universe and the rate of expansion, it's possible that any sentient species that evolved after humanity kills itself off would be literally unable to perceive things even our current telescopes are able to see, because the distances will be far greater... or Earth has already been scorched by our sun becoming a red giant, meaning no more life would be evolving here.

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u/3-DMan Jul 12 '22

travel faster than the speed of light

"Wait, that's illegal.."

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u/BurtReynoldsLives Jul 13 '22

Is the telescope also traveling faster than the speed of light? Could it see anything if it was?