James Webb Space Telescope

[John in Santa Cruz]

yeah, but I think the press has blown it out of scale.

the real news is, it took a bigger ding than expected, and its still performing better than the nominal expectations, and thats *before* they've characterized the damage and recalibrated the mirror that got pinged.

https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/06/...oroid-impacts/

and a fresh update today on science scheduling...
https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/06/...webbs-science/

[Telescopist]

At 44 miles per second even a fraction of a grain of sand can cause damage.

[John in Santa Cruz]

Originally Posted by Telescopist

At 44 miles per second even a fraction of a grain of sand can cause damage.

indeed. 44 miles/sec is 158400 miles/hour. earth orbital speed around the sun is about 30 km/s or 67000 MPH, so something in the same approximate orbit but the opposite direction would be doing easily twice that, and if its in a highly elliptical 'comet' style orbit, even more.

[Centex]

The 'first images' have generated tremendously positive press for the Webb project, here's the NASA page for best viewing / download of 'em:

https://www.nasa.gov/webbfirstimages

[HABBERDABBER]

The 5th image gave me goosebumps. That's a lot of galaxies, stars & planets in there. Trillions? Gazillions? And there's innumerable more out there in the heavens, just like in that image.

It always brings to me the BIG question. When will we rendezvous with others?
A game changer with that notion.

It's a big Universe. And we used to believe and think that the Earth was the center of it all. Good luck with that one. Kaput!

[gbaglo]

We are speck of dust in a piece of lint in the cuff of the universe.

[John in Santa Cruz]

realize, those pictures are just 2-3 arcminutes wide. that's like 1/30th of a degree. a single degree circle has 2800 images like that in it. or, a circle the apparent size of the moon (0.5 degree) might have 700 images like that.

[Mike Lewis]

Originally Posted by John in Santa Cruz

realize, those pictures are just 2-3 arcminutes wide. that's like 1/30th of a degree. a single degree circle has 2800 images like that in it. or, a circle the apparent size of the moon (0.5 degree) might have 700 images like that.

So, the width of the JWST images are about the angular diameter of a large crater on the moon, or crescent Venus, both seen with the naked eye.

[escape artist]

Originally Posted by gbaglo

We are speck of dust in a piece of lint in the cuff of the universe.

Hi: gbaglo... It all points to the fact that the more we know... the more we know... we don't know!!! Alf
escape artist N.S. of Lake Erie

[Mike Lewis]

Originally Posted by HABBERDABBER

It always brings to me the BIG question. When will we rendezvous with others?

Possibly never. Do a search for "rare earth hypothesis" on Wikipedia. There you will find a rather detailed argument of why intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations are probably very rare. I haven't read the Rare Earth book, but I intend to. The "Anthropic Cosmological Principle" went into this for a bit. The authors estimated one intelligent communicating civilization per galaxy at any one time, as I recall. That makes sense to me.

[HABBERDABBER]

It is arguable that there is no intelligent life, even in our own Milky Way galaxy. (That includes Earthlings). But when you look at the vast, unimaginable scale of numbers of suns, planets and potential possibilities...well, I'm going with the odds, and the Drake equation. To traverse the distances for a rendezvous, well, I have no odds or notions on that.

With all this speculation, we simply do not know.

[WillyB]

Our little Milky Way galaxy is a whopping 105,700 light years in diameter. (One Light Year is 6 Trillion Miles)

When you look at the SMACS 0723 imagine the scale of the universe is simply unimaginable.

[Viajante]

Rendezvous is a possibly never event because it involves travel. Detection through radio wave transmission is much more possible and cheaper. But we have been at that point of technology for only about 100 years. Somebody out there 70 light years away might now be watching Howdy Doody and deciding if it’s worth the effort to visit earth.

Since we are at the earliest stages of radio wave transmission and detection anyone we come in contact with is going to be much more technologically advanced than we are. If they are anything like humans that doesn’t bode well for us.

[John in Santa Cruz]

remember, the universe is something like 14 BILLION years old. we were using steam power 120 years ago, and near earth manned travel is only like 50 years old. blink and you'll miss us. a billion is 1000 million, and a million years is 10000 centuries.

[GregWCIL]

Originally Posted by Mike Lewis

Given that the JWST will be gathering data in the infrared, not in the visible spectrum like Hubble, the public may be disappointed in the resulting images. I'm sure NASA's well-oiled PR machine has come up with a workaround, though.

I'm guessing NASA has the multi-million dollar version of Photoshop. Lol

[GregWCIL]

Originally Posted by Centex

The 'first images' have generated tremendously positive press for the Webb project, here's the NASA page for best viewing / download of 'em:

https://www.nasa.gov/webbfirstimages

Alan, we just got back from our inaugural trip with our 5.0. The California Redwoods made us feel so small and just a spec in time.
These Webb images are just too much to comprehend in terms of the immensity of the universe.
And to think, from early indigenous people, to adventurous explorers such as Lewis and Clark to us Escape owners looking up at the night sky over a camp fire -- all the far off things we never saw except in our dreams.

[hugh]

Originally Posted by John in Santa Cruz

remember, the universe is something like 14 BILLION years old. we were using steam power 120 years ago, and near earth manned travel is only like 50 years old. blink and you'll miss us. a billion is 1000 million, and a million years is 10000 centuries.

Yes, it's fascinating that there could be thousands (or billions) of alien life forms that developed and became excinct before we existed, and will likely come and go long after we are gone. Overall, we're just a tiny and temporary anomaly in the inevitable flow of the second law of thermodynamics.



That said, I'm still keeping my fingers crossed that my trailer will arrive this week, before our corner of the universe turns into amorphous molecular soup.

[Viajante]

The universe is 13.7 billion years old. But we can see light from 46 billion light years away in all directions. Yeah, right.

[sunrisetrucker]

Originally Posted by HABBERDABBER

It always brings to me the BIG question. When will we rendezvous with others?
A game changer with that notion.

A Japanese mathematician by the name of Tomonori Totani did the math and concluded that we are it. I read a summary of his research and his conclusion was that there are no other life forms except us. At least in the visible (known) universe.

[Centex]

Originally Posted by Viajante

The universe is 13.7 billion years old. But we can see light from 46 billion light years away in all directions. Yeah, right.

Note that a light-year is a unit of distance-measure, not age-measure of the source of the 'light' (or radiation).

There's absolutely no contradiction in an object being 46 billion (or more) light-years distant in a ~13.x billion year-old universe (it was a VERY BIG bang).

Among the things astronomers hope to learn from WEBB observations and data is the age of certain distant objects, thereby enhancing understanding of the evolution of the universe.

It's quite likely (certain?) that many of the objects now extant 46 billion light-years distant were much closer and much 'younger' than 13 billion years of age when they emitted that light now striking WEBB (and in fact may no longer exist at all at the moment WEBB detects their light).

Space / time .... fascinating and puzzling stuff, eh?