Thetownend.com

https://www.nasa.gov/webbfirstimages

Amazing images released by NASA as the first 'science' product of the JWST.

To think that some of the galaxies visible for the first time in the deep field image are in the region of 13 billion light years away.

Additionally, the bit of sky represented in that image is the equivalent of you looking at a grain of sand held at arms length or, more football related, I have the image on my phone screen and am standing on the goal line at the Stratton Bank end of the pitch. You are looking at my phone from the Town End goal line. Staggering what the future possibilities of this telescope are.

The Carina Nebula image has just become my new wallpaper.

I'm absolutely obsessed by this.

Our next nearest star in the Milky Way is just over 4 light years away. AKA 40 TRILLION kilometres. A human is extremely unlikely to get anywhere near it. For context; The Voyager probes have been soaring through space for over 40 years and hasn't even covered 1/2000th of the distance. If an airline offered a flight there by jet, it would take 5 million years.

So to think that the JW Telescope is taking images of a galaxy 13 Billion LIGHT YEARS away. It's hard to comprehend how far away that is. It's a scale that humans will never be able to understand. At our capabilities, it's beyond infinite.

We are truly insignificant.



 

Blows my mind and gives me anxiety thinking about the size of our space and beyond. The pictures are incredible but trying to wrap my head around them freaks me out.

Apologies for the irrelevant input!

Not irrelevant at all!! I get that feeling when I simply look up into the night sky!! Intensely beautiful, but equally frightening!

Aliens exist. No doubt at all.

In the words of Arthur C Clarke, intelligent life undoubtedly exists elsewhere in the Universe, it is just too intelligent to come here.

Not ever even possible to get there either, as the space between us and that galaxy is expanding faster than the speed of light. Many years in the future we won't even be able to see these far away places

What void is it expanding into? Mind numbing.

I remember sitting at the feet of Sir Fred Hoyle (admittedly 4 decades ago), and him saying that the chances of finding intelligent life elsewhere were infinitessimally small, given the fragility of life on this tiny speck in the universe - ice caps at top and bottom and desert in the middle.....

And that's the bit that head fucks people even more (if they weren't already blown away by the sheer vastness) than they thought. Also the light from our galaxy going back the "other way" to those we see has already gone out. Basically we no longer exist. I think it's something like 98% of Galaxies we can "see" are already gone (including our own). But on the plus there's still a good 60 billion of them knocking about! Phew! 

The fact that light is "lying" to our mere yet fantastic eyes; even to the superb and astronomically powerful JWST. Always important to remember that anything we see has already happened.

With that, one of my fave Adem tunes seems pretty apt for this  :D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaJNr5Ffi-I

"Searching
I wore out my telescope
And I nearly gave up hope
of finding anything.
Discovery
Was an accidental thing
A reflection slipping in
The corner of my eye...

...I saw you
And Moon
But the image was older
Than the truth
When I arrived
I found only tombs
'Cause light is a liar
Telling old truths..."

While we're on Arthur C Clarke quotes I particularly like
“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”

What really fucks with some peoples minds is when you describe deep field astronomy, or any astronomy really as 'time travel'.

Describe it to people as looking into the past. The light that hits you from the sun left there 8 minutes ago. When you look at Jupiter in the night sky, you are seeing it as it was around 43.5 minutes ago (on average). If you have a reasonable set of binoculars and can find the Andromeda Galaxy, that is how it looked 2.5 million years ago. Some of the galaxies in the JWST image are waving at you from 13 billion years ago.

A bit like sitting in the control room of Time Tunnel and looking down the tunnel itself.

Is it true that in one of the pictures if you look closely you can see the ball from McKirdys penalty against Port Vale passing through The Ort Cloud?

That is one fucking decent set of bins  :)
I thought the universe was only 6 billion years old?

Current estimates are around 14 billion years I think

I have read 13.8 billion. Either way how the fuck do they know?

13.8 billion is the closest they can estimate, it could be more or less and we’ll get closer to the true answer (although probably not with 100% precision) as more data/evidence is unearthed. But the 13.8 billion estimate is based on a couple of things, such as study of the cosmic microwave background (a radiation afterglow left behind a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang), study of the oldest known stars we are currently aware of and by looking at the current expansion rate of the universe and by extrapolating back to the big bang

Can you be more precise?

Almost certainly not 😛

😁

The first third of this article is pretty easy to follow. Gets a lot more in depth as it goes on though and once the maths comes out, I'm fucked if I know what they are babbling about.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/12/10/this-is-how-astronomers-know-the-age-of-the-universe-and-you-can-too/?sh=26cb721216d5

Was a good documentary on this telescope on BBC2 last night, assume it can be caught on iPlayer