JWST and Hubble have roughly similar angular resolution. Hubble marginally better. JWST needs larger mirror for the same angular resolution because it uses longer wavelengths.
Hubble: 0.04 arcsec at 500 nm
JWST: 0.068 arcsec at 2 μm
The difference is in wavelengths, image quality, and light collecting ability (size of the mirror). Hubble has to stare longer into a same spot to collect the same amount of light as JWST.
(If I remember correctly JWST took this image in less than 12 hours, Hubble stared at it for much longer. Correct me if I'm wrong).
Hubble's composite of SMACS took 5 orbits, which ends up being about a couple hours maximum. Most websites talked about the deep fields such as XDF (hundreds of orbits) while showing the comparison between the RELICS and JWST pictures, which I believe was very misleading from how this is repeated. Not to detract from its capabilities, of course.
I think it's because they are two syllables. After a short time objects named after people* (Carnegie Mellon, FDR Drive etc) tend to lose the association with the person so honored and just become strings. This is doubly so for names of international scope.
Think of Google, Facebook, Netflix, Workday, Coinbase: two syllables, each name an iamb (which is especially effective in English). Sure, there are numerous counterexamples (microsoft, Amazon), but generally the corners get knocked off and even turn into acronyms in public usage (GM, GE).
Single syllables are too short for infrequently used words (this appears to be true for any language) -- you don't want to waste a lot of time saying "am" since you say it a lot; when you say "biceps" you want enough variability that your brain has time to parse it.
This isn't a real image of an exoplanet right? The one in the background. Nowhere does it say that, which I think is beyond the ability of even JWST, to resolve an exoplanet at 50 light years?
> Exoplanets are too far away and too small to image directly.
If you mean resolving details of the exoplanet, then yes that is currently true. But we have imaged exoplanets directly, meaning taken an image of a star where one can also see the planet directly in the image. [0] has a list of directly imaged exoplanets.
It's an impressive technique. Direct imaging finds planets that would be unlikely to be identified via other detection techniques (such as measuring the wobble in the parent star's radial velocity or measuring photometric eclipses as the planet passes between us and the parent star).
These are annoying to me because lacks of real difference from a senior astronaut viewpoint. As a normal user, the only difference i could see is just "brighter", anything more to add to the details ?
JWST shows a much bigger part of the wavelength spectrum. That means it can image things that would just not show up in Hubble.
E.g. think about far away galaxies that have been redshifted so much (due to the expanding universe) that they fell below the lower wavelength threshold of Hubble.
Zoom in on a small section of sky and toggle between James and Hubble. James reveals many additional galaxy in each tiny slice of image. Probably hundreds or more in that one image alone.
Would there be a moment we cannot zoom in further because we hit the event horizon with the jwst? Or are there still hidden galaxies behind what we can see with the jwst?
I think it won't be a hard border per se, but it'll just turn into extremely redshifted noise at some point; beyond infrared you end up in microwaves, which leads to the cosmic microwave background radiation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background
The furthest back potentially visible stuff before the dark age won’t be galaxies, which formed after the first stars. We still have never seen a first generation star, and I’d be surprised if Webb could.
There's no drifting there. What you are seeing is gravitational lensing. The light of (most likely a galaxy) is bent around another galaxy or star which distorts its appearance. Also this means it can potentially show up multiple times on the image (e.g. opposite side w.r.t. the lensing object)
Thanks for the comments! It does look like some stars may be exhibiting stellar drift, I've isolated an example here: https://academo.org/demos/james-webb-vs-hubble-telescope-com... This is from the middle-right side of the deep field. If you look slightly below the two central galaxies, there is what looks to be a foreground star (I say that due to its brightness and the fact it has a starburst effect) and between the two frames, there seems to be a noticeable shift in position that doesn't occur with other objects.
I was wondering how you made that gif and looking for an option on the UI to automatically export one, but then I realized you are OP. That would be a cool feature to add.
That's a really good point. I think there's a high chance that the photos were taken from quite different locations because Hubble orbits the earth at 570km, whereas JWST is actually at the L2 Lagrangian point, which is about 1.5 million km away from Earth.
(If I remember correctly JWST took this image in less than 12 hours, Hubble stared at it for much longer. Correct me if I'm wrong).