Anyone else excited/nervous about the upcoming James Webb Telescope launch?

Started by littleman, December 19, 2021, 12:13:22 AM

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ergophobe

Sorry, yes, "unambiguous" is a ridiculous bar. I'm still searching for unambiguous signs of intelligent life on earth. But for "intelligent" life, highly varying non-random radio signals would be a strong sign (i.e. the sort of thing SETI was looking for).

But that's pretty interesting

QuoteIn the Archean eon (4 to 2.5 billion years ago), a disequilibrium existed via the coexistence of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, methane, and liquid water, which ordinarily would react to create ammonium and bicarbonate, quickly removing the methane from the atmosphere without the presence of life to replenish it

Now I can see how you could detect possible life without radio signals from a technologically advanced society.

rcjordan

AFAIK, we're searching for signs of carbon-based life.  Roddenberry once mulled over the possibility of silicone-based life forms. Everything else in Star Trek seems to have happened , so why not silicone aliens?

littleman


rcjordan

James Webb smells someone having barbecue in galaxy 12 billion light years away

Most distant smoke and smog discovery could help explain star formation in the early universe • The Register

https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/06/james_webb_aromatics/

+

"On Earth, the molecules, called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, can be found in smoke, soot, smog, engine exhaust and forest fires. "

Webb telescope detects organic molecules in distant galaxy | CNN

https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/06/world/webb-telescope-distant-organic-molecules-scn/index.html

rcjordan


ergophobe

These pictures are gorgeous, but I always wonder how much is art and how much is science. Webb, of course, mostly isn't sensing in the visible spectrum, let alone in color, so all these stunning photos NASA releases are artist's interpretations of the data, but based on some

I have seen photos of the raw images, but was curious how available these are. There is a nice page explaining the JWST image processing and you can actually access the archive of the raw images, which are actually in FITS format. That page also has a link to download the FITS Liberator to convert to TIFF and a link to a step-by-step guide on how to download the original black and white images and colorize them yourself. I can't see doing that, but I wonder how many hobbyists are going in there and grabbing images and, in particular, I wonder how different the images are depending on who does the processing.

https://esawebb.org/about/general/image-processing/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FITS

ergophobe

I didn't find an article with side-by-side interpretations, but here are two quite different versions of the Eagle Nebula Pillars of Creation as captured by Hubble - different colors, different elements highlighted, though still the same orientation (as noted in one of the articles, the orientation is arbitrary and choosing to show them as pillars rather than, say, hanging tentacles, is an artistic choice too).

http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/050303/hubble.shtml
https://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/blueshift/index.php/2016/09/13/hubble-false-color/

This has some nice graphics on how the Hubble images are processed. With JWST there is, of course, a lot more room for interpretation since it is almost entirely in infrared part of the spectrum.
https://hubblesite.org/contents/articles/the-meaning-of-light-and-color


littleman

We have to stay objective, but finding a strong pointer to life outside our planet is pretty exciting.

ergophobe


ergophobe

And now Euclid images are coming in.

I couldn't understand from the article whether these are natively full color or the released images have been processed to full color like Webb or Hubble images. I assume the latter.

https://www.space.com/dark-matter-euclid-mission-first-breathtaking-images

rcjordan


ergophobe


ergophobe

This, on the other hand, is JWST news (or maybe "anti-news" since it's about a thing JWST can't do)

This Cotton Candy Planet Is So Weird Even James Webb Can't See Inside
https://scitechdaily.com/this-cotton-candy-planet-is-so-weird-even-james-webb-cant-see-inside/