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Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail

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Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail

#181

Post by lm28469 »

chrisweekly wrote: post #70
HenryBemis wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And when 'zooming in' and seeing the top 2/3 of the photo ( https://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/im... ) I am super amazed that all these small discs showing are galaxies. GALAXIES (sorry for the caps). How tiny are we (Humans, Earth, Solar system)... less than a speck of dust in the Sahara. I used to look up in space when I was growing up and there wasn't any light pollution to the small town I…

Interesting. I've also always had a visceral response to particularly clear night skies - but it's only ever been a profoundly positive feeling. It kind of erases the idea that my "problems" have any significance at all.

The loss of dark skies is so painful, maybe the worst thing modern life brought to us. I remember laying in the grass with my grandma looking at the stars for hours, she would tell me how the whole village gathered around the only TV they had to watch the moon landing live, about sputnik, galaxies, satellites, &c. there aren't many things as mesmerising, maybe watching a fire or the ocean waves, but it doesn't trigger the same emotions in me.

I don't travel much but when I go to remote areas star gazing is up there on my list of things to do; watch the stars until you're about to pass out from hypothermia, go back inside, make some tea, enjoy the fireplace, forget about the daily (non) problems, it never gets old

Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail

#182

Post by travisjungroth »

xandrius wrote: post #154
travisjungroth wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do think there’s other life out there. But just considering the other side, the statistical model only applies if the existence of life is actually stochastic. If a farmer plants a single tree in the middle of a square mile plot and rips up anything else that grows, any Fermi approximations done by the tree are going to be quite misleading.

Who's this galactic farmer you're talking about?

One or more beings with power and intelligence many orders of magnitude higher than our own. To call it god or gods gives a religious tone to it that totally derails the discussion and I’m specifically avoiding. This isn’t about going to church on Sundays.

There are a few answers to the “Where are they?” question. One is that the parameters to the Drake equation mean life is so rare we actually are alone (as another commenter linked to). Another group of answers is that there is life, but something about the relationship between us means we don’t observe them. Maybe they’re hiding from us. Maybe they’re hiding from everyone.

I think the range of possible answers that people think of for this scenario is generally much too narrow. The power imbalances can be wildly greater than “they’re avoiding us”. We experience power imbalances this large every day. What’s the relationship between a Petri dish of bacteria and a person? Imagine a culture of penicillin reasoning how it came to be.

Maybe this universe is a total construction. Maybe it’s partially constructed, in the same way a farmer “makes” a farm from the Earth. If anything like that is the case, stochastic models are completely the wrong way to reason.

It would be like if I wove a basket. There’s now at least one basket made by Travis Jungroth. Surely there must be more? Out of the millions of baskets made across time, what’s the probability that only one was made by me? Even for a low probability of any individual basket, the numbers start getting decent there’s another out there.

But there’s not. I just… decided to make only one.

Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail

#183

Post by coda_ »

mk_stjames wrote: post #3

The youtube link to a 'zoom' in video to the image: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkVprNB5XbI What is really, really neat to notice isn't just the detail in that final image.... look behind it, and there are whole edge-on spiral galaxies in the distance. Not stars. Galaxies. The nebula is about 1375 light years away. Those galaxies in the distance.... are billions of light years away. It's hard to comprehend.

Do you (or does anyone) know about how zoomed in the video is at the start? Like is that the milky way and are there some things in that starting frame that I could identify with the naked eye?

It seems like it is already quite zoomed in to start with, but I can't tell how much.

Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail

#184

Post by lm28469 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #102
qwertox wrote: post #6

It's so very unlikely that there aren't millions of other lifeforms out there. Sometimes I think that life could well have been just my soul and no one else, but here I am sharing this world with billions of other people, trillions of other lifeforms on this planet alone. So it is possible that more than one lifeform exists, that they share this universe and communicate in it. Why shouldn't this also be possible on m…

>that they share this universe and communicate in it. Why shouldn't this also be possible on millions of other earth-like planets out there? one trivial but powerful observation that von Neumann made was that our galaxy say, is actually pretty small. It's about 100k light years big, which means that any civilization spreading at only a tiny fraction of the speed of light could expand through the entire milky way in o…

> So our galaxy, which contains a few hundred billion stars almost certainly has no other intelligent life in it for the simple reason that it'd be everywhere.

By that account another civilisation as advanced as us would say they're equally alone in the galaxy no ? yet here we are. And you forget time, they might have done that 2b years ago and there is nothing left for us to detect, or they might do it in 2b years and we might not be there to witness it. Also there might be barriers we're not aware of, for example advanced civilisations could go through things like extinction through pollution, over consumption of resources before reaching a tipping point to being multi planetary, &c.

Plus we're far from the only galaxy, there might be galaxy wide civilisations out there, far far away. And more important, nothing guarantees the premise of multi-planetary civilisation has any validity outside of sci-fi

It's like going in the woods twice a year, not seeing mushrooms and concluding mushrooms don't exist on earth because surely you'd have seen them by now! The bottom line is that we just have absolutely no clue

Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail

#185

Post by anigbrowl »

bloopernova wrote: post #12

Gorgeous and upsetting that I'll never be able to visit it. 13 billion years before me, potentially trillions of years after me. Seems like such a waste of the spark of awareness that I can't take that awareness and experience the galaxy in all its glory.

Go camping and bring some friends and psychedelics, it'll help you get over your FOMO

Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail

#186

Post by HenryBemis »

dotnet00 wrote: post #151
syspec wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Experience that all the time with the same imagery, with the same amazement / horror combination. What's more amazing is when you share this fact to most people "did you know each dot here is a GALAXY, not a star!" they go "heh... interesting" and shrug. For some reason that makes the whole thing even crazier to me

I think it just doesn't really click for people most of the time. Eg for my mom no amount of showing science pics and explaining the scale of the distances conveyed things, it only really clicked when Jupiter became visible in the night sky as a particularly bright and large point of light which caught her interest, and when we moved to somewhere dark enough that the galactic plane was faintly noticeable.

Yeah, I haven't seen the milky way with naked eye for a few years.

Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail

#187

Post by HenryBemis »

tobias2014 wrote: post #160
HenryBemis wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And when 'zooming in' and seeing the top 2/3 of the photo ( https://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/im... ) I am super amazed that all these small discs showing are galaxies. GALAXIES (sorry for the caps). How tiny are we (Humans, Earth, Solar system)... less than a speck of dust in the Sahara. I used to look up in space when I was growing up and there wasn't any light pollution to the small town I…

To fuel your cosmic horror: Some of the dots may even be galaxy clusters

Hahahahaha cheers, I had just forgotten about this and was going to sleep, but hey, what's a couple more hours of freaking out! :)

Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail

#188

Post by dekhn »

dylan604 wrote: post #175
Sharlin wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The JWST, as is well known, is a near and mid infrared telescope, its range (600 to 2850 nm) overlapping with human vision only a little bit in the deep red. So every single JWST image is necessarily in false color.

Even Hubble images are false color as well. It uses filters and then recombines them to RGB channels. People naturally ask what they would actually see, but they actually wouldn't see much of anything. Using a telescope to look at things, one only sees a black and white image. We've been shown so much from sci-fi with space ships showing nebulas and nova remnants out their view screens, but that' just not what one wo…

No. A normal visible light telescope absolutely shows color. You can just point a DSLR with a zoom lens and no filters at the sky, take a picture of M42, and confirm that yourself.

Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail

#189

Post by _akhe »

brcmthrowaway wrote: post #159
danielovichdk wrote: post #119

When I look at these images I instantly and fully understand why we are interested in the universe. It is such an incredibly thing. Absolutely astonishing.

For this to exist and me shunting JavaScript around from place to place.. whats the point?

A million years from now our descendants will speak JSON. Your GitHub profile will be one of many temples and ancient sites - an Angkor Wat, a Gobekli Tepe.

People of the future will ask: "{ "question": "What is this .gitkeep file?" }"

And the sages will answer: "{ "answer": "It is a tomb or religious site." }"

Re: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail

#190

Post by seabass-labrax »

the_af wrote: post #49
devsda wrote: post #30

That's an incredibly detailed image. Every single time I see one of these amazing space pics, it's hard not to get all philosophical and wonder about the size of space & time on cosmic scale, how small our earth is and how insignificant our regular problems are. I don't care if I don't get to see flying cars or AGI in my lifetime but I will be very disappointed if our knowledge of space remains more or less the same…

> it's hard not to get all philisophical and wonder about the size of space & time on cosmic scale Indeed! Never a bad time to re-watch Cosmos and (in my opinion) the awesome sequel(s) by Neil de Grasse Tyson. Is it weird to admit I even choke up during some of the episodes? (As an aside, why is it so hard to find the sequels to Cosmos in any streaming service. In my country it's not on Netflix, Disney+, Apple, HBO/M…

Neil de Grasse Tyson is still on my 'to watch' list, but you may be interested in Brian Cox's 'Wonders of the Solar System / Universe' series. From what I've heard, Brian Cox is something of the British equivalent of Tyson. 'Wonders-' is a beautifully shot series that is both educational and remains impressive over a decade on (2010-2011).

The only thing that might be disappointing if you're already into astrophysics is that it's rather dumbed-down compared to his books, which are more earnest, closer perhaps in style to Feynman's Lectures.

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