Space Thread

[Count Nerfedalot]

JWST "fine phasing" alignment completed for its Near Infrared Camera. Still a couple months to go to develop an alignment solution that works for all of the instruments, but NASA seems happy about it.



from https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-webb-reaches-alignment-milestone-optics-working-successfully

This star is 241 light years from earth and 100 times fainter than can be seen with the naked eye.  With other stars and galaxies in the background.

Now, why this picture of a star is so amazing is frankly beyond me, but from what I can gather, it has to do with how many pixels across this almost infinitesimal point of light can be resolved to (i.e. resolution, or the difference between an old spy satellite where a person might be smaller than a single pixel and a new one which can supposedly focus down to enough pixels in a license plate to read the numbers), and just how much light it has collected from this one little point source.  I would REALLY like to see a comparison photo of the same star taken with Hubble. Presumably eventually they will give us some comparison shots but possibly not until May or later when they get all of the instruments aligned properly.

Best news from the associated NASA video was it was "performing better than the models said it should".

[Abagadro]

Now, why this picture of a star is so amazing is frankly beyond me

It's because the resolution is crazy considering it is just a brief exposure for calibration. You can see individual spiral arms in the background galaxies.  Previously the best resolution was from WISE and everything was basically fuzzy blobs.

[Sky]

Detail not just in the background galaxies, but in the deeep background galaxies. Really cool!

[Count Nerfedalot]

my point is, I've seen Hubble pictures that look basically the same, resolution wise. So the difference must be in how far away the stuff is to achieve the same level of detail. Without a side-by-side comparison of pics of the same place the claimed improvement is easy to claim but hard to really comprehend.

[01101010]

my point is, I've seen Hubble pictures that look basically the same, resolution wise. So the difference must be in how far away the stuff is to achieve the same level of detail. Without a side-by-side comparison of pics of the same place the claimed improvement is easy to claim but hard to really comprehend.

I can understand your point of view. I tend to think of these things in terms of time rather than distance so I see the Hubble shots as being a shorter look back time. Question remaining is what is the correct comparison, Dark Ages to early Egypt or first hominids or dinosaurs or first bacteria?

Either way, we are already getting test images that look amazing, I can't wait to see the images it sends once it is fully calibrated and functional. 

[Chimpy]

my point is, I've seen Hubble pictures that look basically the same, resolution wise. So the difference must be in how far away the stuff is to achieve the same level of detail. Without a side-by-side comparison of pics of the same place the claimed improvement is easy to claim but hard to really comprehend.

Dude, that image was a fucking engineering calibration image. Not a science image run through tons of processing to give pretty pictures like the Hubble images you are talking about.

They won't be starting to gather the data for the "real" images until this summer, they are still in the calibration/focusing phase.

This telescope is also looking for/at totally different wavelengths of energy than Hubble so the images are not going to be the "same".

[Abagadro]

Ya, JWST sees in the very far infrared so it can collect light form bodies much further away (because the light has been redshifted so much) and through dust.  It's a completely different instrument designed to study different things from Hubble.

[schild]

my point is, I've seen Hubble pictures that look basically the same, resolution wise. So the difference must be in how far away the stuff is to achieve the same level of detail. Without a side-by-side comparison of pics of the same place the claimed improvement is easy to claim but hard to really comprehend.

James webb is going to see literally *everything* dude.

[slog]

Some scientists announced today that they have spotted a galaxy called HD1 that is 13.5 billion light years away.  A quick google says that the Universe is 13.77 billion years old (give or take a billion) so that means they are observing a galaxy as it formed just after the big bang.  Looking forward to them pointing the James Webb telescope at it.

[Count Nerfedalot]

This is the kind of comparison I was asking for earlier (just not with Hubble but other IR telescopes to keep it an apples-to-apples comparison). Very cool!



Full article here has a lot more good description stuff too: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/james-webb-space-telescope-expectations/

[Khaldun]

China's science ministry is apparently reporting a possible SETI signal detection with their big radio telescope. I'm guessing that scrutiny from other scientists will cause this to evaporate pretty fast but we'll see.

[Sky]

None of the countries capable of first contact should.

[schild]

China's science ministry is apparently reporting a possible SETI signal detection with their big radio telescope. I'm guessing that scrutiny from other scientists will cause this to evaporate pretty fast but we'll see.

[Count Nerfedalot]

Gettin awful crowded in my sky.

sorry for hugemongous image.

Edit by schild: resized image, removed spoiler

[schild]

so, you still read fark?

[Count Nerfedalot]

so, you still read fark?

sometimes. was bored and hoping for some humor with all the ugly news

[Trippy]

First image(s) from Webb:

https://www.nasa.gov/webbfirstimages



Full resolution, uncompressed image will eventually be here:

Edit better image galley link: https://webbtelescope.org/news/first-images/gallery

[Hawkbit]

There's just no possible way in my mind that we aren't seeing hundreds, thousands, more of other life forms in that image.

[Trippy]

Right. The question really, though, is "intelligent" life.

[schild]

Right. The question really, though, is "intelligent" life.

yeah if we're the first ones looking, god forbid we be on the right side of the bell curve

[Samwise]

If all we can see is five pixels worth of a star, knowing that it's there doesn't get us any closer to knowing whether there's life orbiting around it, or if it's intelligent. 

Don't get me wrong, it's pretty cool that we can see something that far away at all, but we need a lot better resolution on this thing if we want to be able to see the Vulcans holding up the big banner that tells us how to build a warp drive.  I'm curious to see what kinds of images we get for things that are a little closer.

[Khaldun]

Not sure that's where the Webb excels? Though I think it's going to be able to see some of the chemical components of exoplanet atmospheres, which might not tell us what the banner the Vulcans are holding up is but maybe some strong signs of probable life around some habitable-zone exoplanets.

[Samwise]

Yeah, seeing exoplanet atmospheres will be more interesting.  I guess there's some chance we might be able to see pollutants that would indicate industrial activity and therefore intelligent life that we could try to focus SETI on?

[Abagadro]

It's not really designed to look for or at planets. Exoplanets weren't even that big of an area of study at the time the thing was designed.  It sees in the far infrared and was designed for high red shift objects to look back at the early universe at galaxy and star formation.

[Teleku]

Yeah, keep in mind that thing is looking way back in time.  We are seeing that galaxy cluster as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago.  For comparison, the sun and rest of the solar system first started forming into their various blobs about 4.6 billion years ago.  So like, several pan-galactic empires could have risen and fallen by this point.

But anyways, here is what NASA's website says about using it to look at planets:

Webb And Exoplanets
One of the main uses of the James Webb Space Telescope will be to study the atmospheres of exoplanets, to search for the building blocks of life elsewhere in the universe. But Webb is an infrared telescope. How is this good for studying exoplanets?

One method Webb will use for studying exoplanets is the transit method, which means it will look for dimming of the light from a star as its planet passes between us and the star. (Astronomers call this a "transit".) Collaboration with ground-based telescopes can help us measure the mass of the planets, via the radial velocity technique (i.e., measuring the stellar wobble produced by the gravitational tug of a planet), and then Webb will do spectroscopy of the planet's atmosphere.

Webb will also carry coronagraphs to enable direct imaging of exoplanets near bright stars. The image of an exoplanet would just be a spot, not a grand panorama, but by studying that spot, we can learn a great deal about it. That includes its color, differences between winter and summer, vegetation, rotation, weather...How is this done? The answer again is spectroscopy.

Spectroscopy
Spectroscopy is simply the science of measuring the intensity of light at different wavelengths. The graphical representations of these measurements are called spectra, and they are the key to unlocking the composition of exoplanet atmospheres.

When a planet passes in front of a star, the starlight passes through the planet's atmosphere. If, for example, the planet has sodium in its atmosphere, the spectrum of the star, added to that of the planet, will have what we call an "absorption line" in the place in the spectra where would expect to see sodium (see graphic below). This is because different elements and molecules absorb light at characteristic energies; and this is how we know where in a spectrum we might expect to see the signature of sodium (or methane or water) if it is present.

Why is an infrared telescope key to characterizing the atmospheres of these exoplanets? The benefit of making infrared observations is that it is at infrared wavelengths that molecules in the atmospheres of exoplanets have the largest number of spectral features. The ultimate goal, of course, is to find a planet with a similar atmosphere to that of Earth.

[01101010]

Yeah, keep in mind that thing is looking way back in time.  We are seeing that galaxy cluster as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago.  For comparison, the sun and rest of the solar system first started forming into their various blobs about 4.6 billion years ago.  So like, several pan-galactic empires could have risen and fallen by this point.

My thoughts exactly. It's not really the distance but the time we are seeing things. Intelligent life exists in that photo, but maybe not at the time that light left those galaxies - or maybe it did and now it is long extinct.

Either way, I am very excited to see what comes out of all this. When stuff that Hubble was taking snaps of (after it was fixed) first hit, the internet wasn't as spread and images weren't easy to download and process.

[Trippy]

Today’s images are up:

https://webbtelescope.org/news/first-images/gallery

[Khaldun]

The clarity is just stunning.

I sort of wish sometimes that they'd tone it down slightly on the color, but it does help those incredibly clear features to really "pop" in this case.

[Samwise]

If the images were in the original infrared they'd be a lot less impressive.   

[pxib]

The other thing to remember is that this is a tiny, tiny portion of the scannable universe chosen because it was relatively empty locally. Every fragment of the sky theoretically looks like this with enough magnification... and this is just the observable universe, a likely significant but modest portion of the whole shebang.

The better we get at looking, the more the Fermi paradox implies we're either the first intelligent, technological life or that Kardashev III is REALLY hard. In fact, it's looking like II may be a real challenge, at least at our galactic level and that nobody's building Bracewell or Von Neumann probes. Both options are bad news, implying an uncomfortable degree of fragility in our present and future, either as precious prototypes or statistically doomed innovators.

Anyway, I especially like all the warped galaxies lensed around the clump of mass in the middle of the image.

[Khaldun]

My big problem with the Fermi Paradox is that it somewhat unthoughtfully assumes that all sequences of technological development with sapient, technology-making life are necessarily going to recapitulate something like human history to date. It feels to me like a mistake human beings have made before: assuming Earth was the center of the universe, assuming that the Solar System represented a normal or typical solar system, etc. Reasoning from the one thing we know.

Even on our own planet, there are other species that could reasonably be said to be sapient whose trajectory of technological development would be radically different if they ever started to move in that direction. We already know what sapience without pressures towards technological development might look like on our own planet: dolphins, whales, great apes, elephants all exhibit some of the characteristics of sapience and they're all able to envision novel ways to manipulate their environments with deliberate intent under the right circumstances. An aquatic species like dolphins that happens to have manipulative digits and some pressures that pushed them towards more and more technological innovation would likely imagine pathways that we can't even envision.

If it turns out that what solves the Fermi Equation in terms of detectable signals with our current technology is "bipedal ape-like organisms on quite specifically Earth-like planets orbiting stars that are quite close to the Sun whose societies develop in more or less the same way as Earth", now that might turn out to be a really really small universal number indeed. Even in that number, it might be that the era where such a civilization is indiscriminately blasting signals into space is incredibly short--we're arguably going to be out of that era ourselves within the next century even if we find a way to cope with climate change, etc.

It might literally never occur to some intelligent species with advanced technological pathways that they should build Von Neumann probes, etc. Any sapient, technology-making species that evolves underwater, under ice crusts like Europa's, etc. really just might not think of it even if they become aware of space and the wider universe. But it may also be that there are intelligent, technological species out there that are using completely different signal bandwidths or forms than we're able to imagine or detect.

[Sky]

Hot take lol

[Trippy]

All of those are factored into the Drake equation. I.e. the equation includes variables for "intelligent" life developing on a planet and said life revealing their location by emitting signals into space and also how long those signals are transmitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

[Trippy]

I would REALLY like to see a comparison photo of the same star taken with Hubble. Presumably eventually they will give us some comparison shots but possibly not until May or later when they get all of the instruments aligned properly.

Ask and you shall (eventually) receive:

(Bandwidth intensive):

https://johnedchristensen.github.io/WebbCompare/

[Khaldun]

Yeah, I'm just saying that there seems a likely solution to the Drake Equation that says "Sapience common, technological civilizations common, technological civilizations communicating or signalling in a way that we know how to pick up right now and that just happen to be detectable in the really short time frame that we've been looking, exceptionally rare to non-existent".

Which might just mean we have learn to think more broadly about possible signals and signs. Including something like the Webb or a future instrument being able to see clear signs of industrial or post-industrial technological output at a planetary scale.