Yeah I was a bit annoyed at that one, generally I find ArsTechnica's clickbait not that bad but this one bothered me.
Like I get what they were going for, but unless we know that the matter that we are made of is there in this image than it is a scientific inaccuracy that I wish we did not actively spread.
Now I know that we are looking into the past here, but unless my understanding of space is wrong the only way this would actually be true is if our sun (and other related material) moved faster than the speed of light.
At least that is how I read the headline, that the image shown is (or would be) the material that makes us up now.
Using gravitational lensing I imagine it's possible to get an image of the earth from the distant past, though difficult to get everything lined up right. In a more trivial sense, you could take a mirror to the moon then take a picture of it from earth and you would have an image of earth from the mysterious past of a few seconds ago.
I think it is annoying because it's so arrogant. Ok fine technically you can say anything is humanities past in the sense that it's in the past, but it's presumptuous to act like we have ownership of something so wildly broad. I think it would still be presumptuous to connect it to us even if it was about the history of our own sun or to pre homo-sapien geology, this is just even more so.
The way I read this was "The Webb telescope just offered a view of starbirth that sheds light on earths distant past," it's accurate in that sense (our star was born and we're not sure how exactly) and agree could have been worded better.
We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion year old carbon
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden
Well, then can I roam beside you?
I have come to lose the smog,
And I feel myself a cog in somethin' turning
And maybe it's the time of year
Yes and maybe it's the time of man
And I don't know who I am
But life is for learning
Not really, it's believed the hydrocarbon clouds are a precursor to possible life formation, and that it's possible that's exactly how our solar system was formed in such a way to produce life on Earth, which is inarguably the precursor for humans. So to say this is looking at something that happened similarly in our (human) distant past is at least accurate based on our current understanding. A bit sensational, perhaps, but I wouldn't call it clickbait.
I feel that it is disingenuous in the same way that it would be disingenuous to write an article about neolithic agricultural practices and title it "How Google Came to Be." Are these things causally related? Yes, they are. But that doesn't make them topically related.
Has our society always run on clickbait or has the internet just made the fact visible?
Clickbait = temptation, if you want to get religious about it. That's what demons always do in the stories. They tempt. They assault the saint with powerful clickbait.
No. It has always been present, but there used to be a greater respect for accuracy and knowledge, and much writing offered to inform the reader than activate their emotions ('eg just offered a revelatory view' implying that this is somehow time-sensitive news).
If you want a clear but depressing example, visit a digital archive and contrast issues of scientific American from the beginning and end of the 1990s. At the beginning of the decade it offered a serious presentation of science news/insights for a general audience (more accessible than an academic paper, but still requiring work to read, similar to a textbook). By the end of the decade standards had fallen considerably as their audience shrank and they went in the direction of greater 'accessibility' with more gee-whiz articles, columnists etc, and even introducing a larger body text font to reduce the content while maintaining the same page count.
It seems to me that the main drivers were popular access to the internet and a general drop in attention spans, along with the proliferation of cable TV channels during the same period, and the rise of '24 hour news' outlets like CNN and Fox News, both of which are cancerous. Television in general is trash, with an endless focus on effects and visual gimmicks designed to hypnotize rather than inform or educate.
One thing about the internet is the globalness. Nothing's local anymore. All news, all advertising, is competing with a million others for your attention, instead of just a local dozen.
It's like having a hundred people in your living room all the time.
It's my understanding that the Sun's natal star cluster is thought to have been bigger than this one, with maybe 10,000 newborn stars.
I recommend finding these stars (they will have distinctive and similar compositions) and treating them as SETI targets, on the off chance life originated before the star cluster dispersed and then spread between the closely spaced systems (panspermia).
Very thoughtful. It stands to reason that life has a way of clustering amidst repulsion, so it ought to have formed relatively local to us, given we exist.
Imagine if each panel in the image was hyperlinked to smaller zoomable files that seamlessly floated in and out as you zoom around. All of it mirrored and replicated in backups and hoovered up in NSA profiles for perpetuity. Almost as breathtaking...
Thanks,it is an amazing image. I was thinking I'd love to order a print of it, looks like it should be possible to get one made from the high res image.
The connection to “humanity’s distant past” is quite tenous:
> But it is very real, showcasing the process of stars being born a mere 390 light years from Earth. This is the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth.
> Given the nursery's proximity and Webb's unparalleled scientific instruments, we have never had this kind of crystal-clear view of these processes before. [...]
> This is a revelatory view of our own distant past. Our own star and Solar System formed a little more than 4.5 billion years ago, when a molecular cloud collapsed into what became our Sun.
> Farther away from this star and its cavity, there are orange-ish clouds. According to the Webb telescope's astronomers, these are organic compounds known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. These carbon-rich compounds are possibly an essential part of the genesis of life, although scientists are unsure of this.
Rho Ophiuchus is 'upside down' relative to the pic in TFA. The bright stars with diffraction spikes in the JWST image are the three topmost stars in the visible image that are white and obscured by dust.
I wish more astronomy photos included scale information. I like using outlines of the moon and of Saturn as appropriate units for the task at hand.
I wonder what happens in a star nursery when a star first ignites for the first time. Is it an immediate flash that dims, or does it take centuries to become visible?
As the gas cloud collapses into a protostar, it undergoes adiabatic heating. The intense heat causes radiation pressure which prevents the protostar from collapsing further. (it will also do deuterium/lithium burning, but to a first approximation the protostar is heated by the gravitational collapse) Only as the excess heat is radiated away can the star shrink into a main sequence star that burns hydrogen into helium. During the protostar phase, it's enveloped in a gas cloud. As the heat from the star evaporates and blows away its gas cloud, it becomes a pre main sequence star, and it's not easily distinguishable from a main sequence star. It is a very hot object that will shine brightly. If you were to just look at it in a telescope, it will appear the same as any other star. Only after it's allowed to radiate energy away for a few tens to hundreds of thousands of years will it shrink enough to begin burning hydrogen into helium and will its collapse halt. There is no flash or anything, and it does not begin suddenly; a minor amount of fusion will happen, and then it will eventually accelerate into a steady state.
And the smaller the star, the longer it takes to settle onto the main sequence. This is an argument against life around small (class M) stars: they will have roasted any planet that would otherwise have ended up in the habitable zone.
Good point, though might they not regenerate this over time? I can see a few possible mechanisms:
The planets would have lost surface and crustal water, probably, but might have considerable subterranian water, which might work its way to the surface through tectonic activity.
There could be ongoing water accumulation through comet and asteroid impacts from objects more remote in the solar system. Given that dwarf stars have a quite consolidated habitable zone, "remote" might be far closer in than in our own solar system.
Water could be generated through chemical action of oxides (e.g., silicates and ferrites) with hydrogen. Hydrogen itself might arrive via the solar wind.
Timescales for dwarf stars are immense, so processes which were consolidated into a few tens or hundreds of millions of years on Earth might well occur over tens, hundreds, or thousands of billions of years on a dwarf-star planet. Even slow processes (e.g., hydrogen deposition mentioned above) could contribute substantial mass over time.
Really glad Webb has been a success. I remember everyone being very tense around the launch given the degrees of failure possible. Truly a milestone for science.
Solar system is 4.5 billion years old. The sun has been around the galaxy 18 times since forming.
And as you can see from that image the gases that make up star forming regions are literally blown around by the nearby stars.
So combining fragility of a nebula with time plus 18 loops and I think it's totally gone.
Plus I saw a YouTube video a few days ago that theorised that earth sized rocky planets would only form around suns in star forming regions with nearby massive bright stars that would be actively tearing the nebula apart at the same time that the planets were forming.
Likely the stars born from it (including ours) accreted most of the gas & dust and the rest dissipated through stellar radiation pressure. Its been more than 5 billion years.
It says “ Our own star and Solar System formed a little more than 4.5 billion years ago, when a molecular cloud collapsed into what became our Sun. As the Sun formed, it did so with a large disk of leftover material about it, spinning. Over time, the material in this disk coalesced into the planets, large gas giants like Jupiter and smaller rocky worlds like our own Earth.” How would one reconcile the fact that the heavy elements in the rocks that formed the earth could only be produced as result of fusion and supernova process? Was the material captured by the hydrogen cloud that later formed the solar system?
Some part of me wonders if the truth of the universe exists in Photoshops cloud filter. I can create some of these images with a few clouds, twirls and layer blends. It’s all usually just very random.
I’m gonna lose my mind if one of these telescope pictures comes back with a lens flare.
We may not be in a simulation, but instead inside God’s photoshop.
For anyone knowledgeable about the technical process behind it: how long is the exposure period for an image capture, for it to get these contiguous regions of "color"/wavelength? Is there any postprocessing to smoothen it out? Are the lens flare entirely from the original data from the telescope?
Afaik Webb is mainly an infrared telescope, which is why it has such a large heat screen and is so far from the earth. None of what you see from it is visible light really.
The diffraction spikes on point sources are real and are an artifact of the support structures and mirror configuration of the telescope. If you look at the telescope you'll see all the mirrors are hexagonal, which corresponds to the six spikes on every point source of light.
Whoah! I was just thinking "aren't these things all colourised by a human and largely fake", I was especially thinking about the starbusts and you just blew my mind. Thank you!
Do you know if the colourisation essentially just a frequency shift into visible light or is there some human artistic license involved?
I believe this photo was taken using filters for three wavebands of IR, with each waveband presented as a different colour. That doesn't sound like "human artistic licence" to me.
But ultimately it's all just data transformed into a visible image; there's plenty of scope for artistic licence in the rendering, if that's what you want.
The striking thing for me is the two diagonal red spikes pointing in opposite directions; apparently a newly-formed giant star does this.
"Huge bipolar jets of molecular hydrogen, represented in red, dominate the image, appearing horizontally across the upper third and vertically on the right. These occur when a star first bursts through its natal envelope of cosmic dust, shooting out a pair of opposing jets into space like a newborn first stretching her arms out into the world."
It is not a frequency shift - it’s a colormap applied to the imaging data and there’s considerable creative license in the coloration, most prominently with the selection of a colormap but also with other aspects of post processing. I’m not an astronomer, but thats my layperson understanding and I’d love to be corrected if anyone has more info.
There's some "artistic license" that you could also call scientific license, because you want to pick colors that maximize contrast and highlights features you want to highlight, like different atomic elements.
The "NIRCam Compass" version of the image includes the map of filter to colour that was used.[1] It's not as easy to find, but the documentation for the telescope also includes a complete list of all the filters and what they're used for.[2]
The number in the filter name is (the center wavelength in nanometers) / 10, or (the center wavelength in microns) * 100. An "N" at the end means "narrow" and "W" indicates "wide".
For this image, the team used a pretty straightforward mapping of five filters to more or less the colours of the rainbow in ascending order of filter wavelength, with the shortest wavelength being mapped to purplish-blue and the longest being mapped to orange-red.
When I first got interested in imaging outside the wavelengths we can see, like a lot of people I assumed that the most "accurate" way to represent the data would be to pick three bands in order of descending wavelength and map them to the red, green, and blue channels. That can certainly be a useful approach, but there are often better ways to process the data that make it easier to see things of interest in the result. In particular, doing a R/G/B mapping means that most of the detail in the blue channel is invisible to human eyes, because they're so much less sensitive to blue. TLDR: I think the approach used for this image strikes a nice balance between "intuitive to humans with typical colour vision" and "highlights areas of interest in the image in a useful way".
If you find a pair of Adidas slides in a barren desert, nobody in their right mind will argue that it has a creator and intended purpose. However people to this very day are still arguing whether magnificent celestial objects in the vast and largely empty universe that follow specific physical laws with ultra precision order and timing with conscious beings as inhabitants (at least on earth) has any creator and intended purposes.
Probably not the best place for this kind of comment…
Also, like most analogies, this one leaks. Even if our species dies off, whatever discovers our remains has direct, tangible evidence to fall back on: the shoes were likely created by the creatures who have evidence of living on the same planet.
I find good evidence for some kind of creator (Aquinas' "five ways" make a compelling case based purely on reason), but at the end of the day this tells us nothing about "intended purposes". At that point we are relying on fallible human interpretation, which history shows is a path fraught with dragons.
I mean... even as an Atheist my self I would think it would be much easier to believe in a god to explain where things came from (but of course that asks where did god come from) than the near mystical start of the universe and asking how that started in the first place.
Like it completely boggles my mind to try to think about how everything started, even if some theories are true and the Big Bang was not the start at some point you would think something had to be a start to "stuff".
Also frankly... religion brings comfort to a lot of people and as long as someone is not using it to harm someone else (like deny rights) than I don't think we should downplay or attack someone for believing in something that makes the hard parts (like the inevitability of death) easier to deal with.
We like to think that infinity or at least something very old and very large could allow this to randomly get there eventually. But no, it's not that big and not that old and the math just doesn't have enough dice rolls to get us here to where we are right now.
If those slides fit my foot and keep the desert sand from burning my feet, wouldn’t I understand their purpose and think they were made by someone? In fact all adidas slides have a creator, so I think I’m missing your point.
