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Direct links -- Stephan's Quintet (NIRCam and MIRI Composite Image): https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01G7DB1FHPMJCCY59CQGZC1YJQ.png Southern Ring Nebula (NIRCam and MIRI Images Side by Side): https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01G79R28V7S4AXDN8NG5QCPGE3.png “Cosmic Cliffs” in the Carina Nebula (NIRCam Image): https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01G7ETPF7DVBJAC42JR5N6EQRH.png Webb's First Deep Field (NIRCam Image): https://stsci-opo.org…
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Maybe my question would be better asked for other objects images then, but I can just google how far things are redshifted at extreme distances as well.
My understanding is that the IR here is used to see "through" the "smoke", so you can see more details that would normally be obstructed. A good way to see this is comparing it to Hubble [1], a lot of the extra detail you see is thanks to IR letting you see the stars behind. [1] https://johnedchristensen.github.io/WebbCompare/
What causes this "smoke"?
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Existential dread pro-tip: The Wikipedia page on "Ultimate fate of the universe" is a fantastic way to compell the question of why anything ultimately matters. Coming up with personal answers to this is the ultimate character resolve exercise!
Nothing matters. You live for a while and then you die, but it sure can be a cool trip getting there!
“Everything as a whole does not matter” or “there is no single ultimate purpose to everything as a whole” are more valid claims, but tautological. Something can only matter to some subject by definition, and ‘everything’ is a magic word that includes every thing, so it can’t matter to anything else, by definition, because there is no thing outside everything to which it could matter. This tautology is not well summarised as “nothing matters”.
I used to take solace in the “nothing matters” notion from nihilism, but I now think it’s a false and dangerous comfort. 1) it’s straight up disprovable with a few seconds’ analysis – really just a motivated twisting of the above tautology into something quasi-profound, and 2) it’s burying your head in the sand – it’s avoidant wordplay that will eventually fail you, engendering a dull feeling of narcissistic loneliness over time. I now think it’s better to recognise that each case of something ‘mattering’ requires both an object and a subject. That subject isn’t always you, but you might as well start with the cases where you are the subject. You can notice things that matter to you (just basics like pain, pleasure), and that they do indeed matter to you. Then you can consider that there are other minds, and realise that what matters to them isn’t the same as what matters to you - but the fact that things do matter to them may itself matter to you, and so on and on. Once you start looking for meaning you realise the universe is absolutely teeming with it. Just an unfathomable number of connections of meaning between subjects and objects. In human society there is a combinatorial explosion of matterings.
Life is indeed a cool trip, an adventure, but only so because it is so full of events that absolutely fucking matter along the way. And yes, then you die. That doesn’t mean none of it mattered to you, and it doesn’t mean none of what you did mattered to anyone else. These are just logical errors.
You might think I’m just being pedantic. But I think it’s a very important distinction. “Nothing matters” is not just pedantically different from “There isn’t one single universal reason for everything as a whole”, it’s completely different in its implications. The former is an oversimplification that causes a lot of unnecessary feelings of bleakness, and probably causes a lot of indirect social harm by drawing excellent minds into inaction, springing from a platitude we tell ourselves when things get too much and then repeat as a kind of sad-mantra. The latter correctly reveals itself as tautological wordplay that we may discard as meaningless.
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WASP-96b has an orbit that passes in front of its star, Proxima Centauri b doesn't. An obvious target for the coronagraph for regular imaging, but there's no way to get a transmission spectrum of its atmosphere.
How long would we likely have to wait for another more distant star in our galaxy to pass behind it from our perspective?
The real problem is that Prox c. b is only 0.04 AU out from its host star. So the absorption spectra for a star lined up with the planet is going to be pretty well contaminated with light from Prox c. You could imagine various schemes for moving around the observer for the best angle or big occultation disks, but at a certain point it's going to be easier to just fly a probe over and sample the atmosphere directly.
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Why does valuing the journey mean you don't value other people?
It doesn’t. It just refutes the claim that nothing matters.
Does the cosmos care if I give my Mother a birthday present or not? Unlikely it does. Do I? Yes, I send one every year. Does it matter then? Not really, but I like doing it because I like being nice to my Mother.
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I found Kurzgesagt's video on Optimistic Nihilism helpful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBRqu0YOH14
Awesome link, thank you. Nietzsche's career was an exercise in creating and promoting the concept of 'creative nihilism' as an alternative to existential pessimism, which works for me!
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Something missing from this discussion that's worth pointing out: This image shows profound "gravitational lensing", which you know. But what you might not know is that is precisely _why_ they chose to photograph it. This galaxy cluster (SMACS 0723) may be the most well known and powerful gravitational lens we have observed. The galaxies shown distorted around the edges are actually behind the lens, but are magnified…
The elongated double lensed galaxy to the right of centre shows lots of point sources. These look like globular clusters or maybe satellite galaxies (maybe these are the same thing in the early universe?).
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Thanks, but how is the sausage made then? Guess, that’s my main question. I get that the aquired data needs to be transformed in a way so we get an image that depicts a reality we can visually process. I honestly thought there’s some tools in Nasa’s imaging group that, based on scientific rules, pumps out an image that is correct - seeing Photoshop in use left me wonder… I get that the investment needs to be “sold” t…
No, there's none of that. These pictures aren't being used for any kind of science. They're 100% PR pieces, made to look pretty - which is fine!
So I'm not sure where the sentiment that these are just images for the public is coming from. That's certainly part of why these observations were made and processed this way, but there is science too.
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I’m confused.. why would we expect some other image processing software to be better than Photoshop - a software package which has been the top of its class for ~30 years?
Because photoshop it not open source, not verifiable, and not documented on a scientific level about how its filters behave.