First colour image from JWST Today at 10pm

I was impressed.

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mrk said:
You guys do realise that all space telescope photos have to have colour processing done right? There is a technical reason for this so our eyes can actually see colours we recognise.
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It's a shame there's not a single person alive today who will ever get to see what all the objects actually look like to the naked eye and all we'll ever get is photoshopped infrared images
 
They're not "photoshopped" in the sense that I think some are assuming, as in random fake colours. You simply won't ever see deep space images in their full natural colour because human eyes cannot see that sort of light/colour spectrum.
 
mrk said:
Impossible, beyond this point everything is travelling faster than what light can travel so we will never ever be able to see beyond a certain point - That point doesn't have a fixed number yet as all this is still new but, the start of our universe will never be visible as it's expanded off into the distance of space and as the universe is still expanding, the light simply will never reach us.
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I think it is more the problem that as we go back in time the universe gets hotter and hotter, eventually we will reach a point where we wouldn't be able to see anything.
 
Tephnos said:
I think it is more the problem that as we go back in time the universe gets hotter and hotter, eventually we will reach a point where we wouldn't be able to see anything.
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The heat has long gone from those times into the expanded universe, everything is just black and full of nothingness (or rather, dark matter since that acocunts for the bulk of "space").

Hubble made revised numbers as to the rate of expansion not long ago and NASA states that JWST will continue refining what Hubble started and probably get an even better idea of how far things have gone etc.
 
Astronomer here! This is SUCH a strange but wonderful day (at the start of a strange and wonderful week)- I have literally been hearing about JWST for the majority of my life, since I was a teenager first getting interested in astronomy, and to see that we are now truly in the JWST era is mind-boggling! Not gonna lie, I think a cynical part of me thought something would go wrong and we wouldn't get here... and not only seeing the images, but having such immense pride for the humans who made this possible, is just so emotional. :)

To answer a few quick questions I've seen around:

What is the image of?

A galaxy field called SMACS 0723, located 4.6 billion light years away. What's more, because of the orientation of the foreground galaxies we get to see some really zany gravitational lensing of light from galaxies much further away in this field- about 13 billion years, to be precise! So these are all very young galaxies, all formed just a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang. Incredible! And wow, never seen galaxies like those lensed ones before- very Salvador Dali, if I may say so. :D

The ones that appear to have white light are the ones creating the lensing 5-ish billion light years away, and the reddish ones are the lensed ones. (At least, I'm pretty sure that's how it works as a general rule of thumb.) Here is Hubble's view of the same field by comparison, courtesy of /u/NX1 downthread.

Also note, JWST is an infrared telescope (ie, light more red than red) because its first science priority was to detect the earliest galaxies (it's been under development so long exoplanets frankly weren't the huge thing they are now), and by the time the light from the earliest galaxies reaches us, it has been "redshifted" to these wavelengths. So before you couldn't see these lensed galaxies with Hubble, and to see them let alone in such detail is astounding!

Pretty! Is there scientific value to it?

Yes! The thing to realize is even with these very first images, because JWST is able to see in detail no telescope has had before there's a ton of low hanging fruit. In the case of this image, one of the big outstanding questions is a feature called the UV luminosity function, which tells you the star formation rate in those early galaxies. If you literally just count up the number of galaxies you see in those first JWST images, you'll already know more about the star formation rate in the early universe than we do now! Further, when you study the gravitational lensing pattern, you can learn about those foreground galaxies- things like their mass, and how the dark matter is distributed around them. OMG this is gonna be so neat!

I need more JWST images in my life! What's next?

There is a press conference tomorrow at 10:30am! At the press conference there will be several more images revealed, from the Carina Nebula to Stephan's Quintet (links go to the Hubble images to get you psyched). There will also be some data revealed, such as the first exoplanet spectrum taken by JWST- note, exoplanet spectra have been done before scientifically, but the signal to noise of JWST allows this to be done to greater accuracy than before. (No, this is not going to have a signature from life- it's a gas giant exoplanet, and it's safe to say if it had a signature from life Biden would have revealed that today.)

Pretty pictures aside, can I access the actual science data? And when will we see the first JWST pictures?

The JWST archive will be launched with all the commissioning data for these images on Wednesday, July 13 at 11am EDT, with the first Early Release Science programs' data going up on Thursday. Specifically for the latter, there are "early release science" programs which are going to be prioritized over the first three months (list here) where those data are going to be immediately available to the public, so everyone can get a jump start on some of the science. (Also, the next cycle of JWST proposals is in January, so this is going to be really crucial for people applying for that.) My understanding from my colleague is there are many people in the sub-field of early galaxies who literally have a paper draft ready to go and intend to get the preprints out ASAP (like, within hours), just because there will be so much low hanging fruit for that field in those very first images! Like, I'll be shocked if they're not out by the end of the week, and the place to see those first science papers are on the ArXiv (updates at 0:00 UTC).

You can learn more about the JWST archive here.

How did they decide what to observe anyway?

As is the case for all NASA telescopes, anyone in the world can apply for JWST time! You just need to write a proposal justifying why your idea is better than anyone else's, and well enough that a panel of astronomers agrees. In practice, it's really competitive, and about 4.5x more hours were requested than there are literal hours for JWST to observe (actually way better than Hubble which has been closer to 10x- Hubble can only observe on the night half of the Earth's orbit, but JWST has a sun shade so you get almost nonstop observing). The resulting proposals that won out are all a part of "Cycle 1" which begins this week, and you can read all about them here. (Cycle 1 includes the Early Release Science projects I discussed above.)

As an aside, while I am not personally involved in it (I'm more on the radio astronomy side of things) I'm super excited because my group has JWST time! We are going to observe what is likely to be the first neutron star merger observed by JWST- I very much hope to be able to look over the shoulder of the guy in charge of the project type thing. :) Because we have no idea on when that is going to happen, we basically have the right to request JWST observations if we see a signal called a short gamma-ray burst that tells us one of these events has occurred, and they'll change the schedule to squeeze us in as soon as they can (probably a week or two, with faster turn around in future years). Whenever it happens, I'm sure I'll tell you guys all about it! :D

Anyway, a toast to JWST- and if anyone who works on it is reading this, we are all so proud of you! I can't wait to see where this new adventure takes us!
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A quoted post from Reddit by a respectable member.
https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comm.../?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
 
mrk said:
The heat has long gone from those times into the expanded universe, everything is just black and full of nothingness (or rather, dark matter since that acocunts for the bulk of "space").

Hubble made revised numbers as to the rate of expansion not long ago and NASA states that JWST will continue refining what Hubble started and probably get an even better idea of how far things have gone etc.
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I'm aware the heat has long gone (now), but we would see it in 'real time' so to speak, due to how light travels through space. Just like how those galaxies we are looking at is what they looked like 13 billion years ago. Everything we are looking at in space is just a snapshot of how it used to look.

If we could go back far enough, we would be able to see the creation of the universe. Alas, the extreme heat for the first few million years after it was created prevents us from doing so.
 
That's if we could, but we can't and never will unless we can figure out a way to make light travel faster than the universe that is travelling faster than light:p

Interestingly, Sky News did a better recap than the White House lol:

 
mrk said:
That's if we could, but we can't and never will unless we can figure out a way to make light travel faster than the universe that is travelling faster than light:p

Interestingly, Sky News did a better recap than the White House lol:

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This is still not the problem, we can see fine. The problem is the early universe before the CMB was an opaque plasma that cannot be viewed with visible light.

There are theories we could do this with gravitational waves, and there is a telescope planned for this in 2037 that could allow us to 'see' beyond the CMB.

Eventually, you would be correct, and the origins of the universe would be completely lost to us. Thankfully, that's for a future alien civilisation to worry about. Our observable universe is very large for now, and is based off of calculations done based on how far back we can look in time. For now, the universe is actually young enough that it is possible we could observe all the way back. For now, the CMB remains the limit.
 
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so why are their (hexagonal/60degree) radial(e: axial i suppose) light rays off of the stars .. is that an image processing option , consequence of the mirrors symmetry ?
 
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