this is the part that makes it weird. it's essentially a touched up photo which interprets non imageal data in image terms. not real essentially. looks impressive though.
It's representing stuff that is there, though. We just can't see it, because our eyes evolved to see a very specific range of light that makes the most sense on a planet orbiting our particular star. IMO that counts as real. But yeah, any picture that just shows what we could physically see wouldn't be very impressive.
I wouldn't say so. A lot of Hubble's pictures look impressive, as well as many pictures taken by the huge telescopes on earth. All those largely work in the visual range.
yeah it's still real in that sense. just the colours and extreme touch ups aren't real.
Even those pictures are colourized, to be fair. But the colours do represent things that are there.
Webb’s image covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground – and reveals thousands of galaxies in a tiny sliver of vast universe.
Full rez pic
And rather ironically it’s the sheer size and vastness that means we’ll probably never know if we are or not.
Yep. Also we'd never know if ET civilisations have been and gone in the last billions of years. It's scary.
It does apply elsewhere. Here’s an RGB image I took and processed of Triangulum Galaxy using the OU’s PIRATE telescope on Mt Teide, Tenerife:
13.5 billion × 9.46 trillion km = distance some of the galaxies in that image are. Mind blowing!
Unless humanity finds a way to dismantle and reconfigure the stringent principles of physics (as we interpret them), there are things that we just won't be able to do — no matter how long the time horizon from now, or the level of technological advancement. Looking at the Big Bang itself would be one of those things, because there's literally nothing to look at — at a certain point in the universe's history, you are confronted with an inaccessible curtain (and there's no way to peer through under the standard cosmological model). One day, we might be able to observe and map out the cosmic neutrino background (1 to 2 seconds after the Big Bang) or some of the earliest gravitational waves with impossibly massive and impossibly sensitive interferometers (and try to simulate a physical representation), but that is not going to happen anytime soon.
All the stars we see with our own eyes in the sky are in the Milky Way, and so they're all still there. Many of the galaxies in the JWST pictures are really far away, and thus really old, so individual stars in them probably aren't there, depending on the type, but the galaxies are still around. The one clear exception is when we see supernovae. In that case the stars are most definitively not there anymore.I was always told that the stars we see probably disappeared years ago, but we only see them now because of how far away they are and how long it takes light to travel. What's the truth in that?
And heading from that, what effect does looking through a super powerful telescope have on that? For example, they are a star in the sky and decide to lock in with their telescope to take a look. Is it still there when they look? Or are these telescopes not powerful enough in the grand scheme to make any difference to the aspect of time?
EDIT: I've gone back a page and seen this is actually already being discussed and that it is a big factor
Much more, actually! They may have been that far away when the light was emitted, but in the meantime there's been 13.5 billion years of expansion of space. I don't know the exact number (NASA definitely does, and astronomers and other people who are smarter than me can work it out), but it wouldn't surprise me if it's more like 35-40 billion light years now. The Observable Universe itself is something like 90 billion light years in diameter.
So the universe is guessed 13.9 billion years old and in that time the big bang has managed to push enough material out into space for the universe to be 90 billion light years across, with an infinite amount of galaxies and stars, all the while black holes devouring up as much of it as they can. My tiny mind is incapable of understanding that. How can the big bang have done that. It must have been one hell of a bang to just explode all that out of nothingness.
The universe expands faster the further we observe and that acceleration is 70km/mpc. And I think a mega parsec is 3.2ly. So yea do lots of maths with that..
Now take the mindfeck to another level by trying to visualize all of that knowing the universe doesn’t really have a central point in space from which the Big Bang emanated even though we know it is expanding (*insert ‘mind blown’ gif).
That's a regular parsec. A mega parsec would be... 3.2 million light years? That's still a lot of expansion, given how stupid big space is.
Not with that attitude its notUnless humanity finds a way to dismantle and reconfigure the stringent principles of physics (as we interpret them), there are things that we just won't be able to do — no matter how long the time horizon from now, or the level of technological advancement. Looking at the Big Bang itself would be one of those things, because there's literally nothing to look at — at a certain point in the universe's history, you are confronted with an inaccessible curtain (and there's no way to peer through under the standard cosmological model). One day, we might be able to observe and map out the cosmic neutrino background (1 to 2 seconds after the Big Bang) or some of the earliest gravitational waves with impossibly massive and impossibly sensitive interferometers (and try to simulate a physical representation), but that is not going to happen anytime soon.
Big Bang Time Line
Development of a Relic Neutrino Detection Experiment at PTOLEMY
Yea I know I was drunk
I had a canvass of the sombrero Galaxy, also can't wait to see my favourite hubble image of the horsehead nebula in infrared
It's more mind blowing that space is expanding, but what is it expanding into? There must be space for it to expand into.
If you believe that ours is a Universe, then there is nothing to expand into.
They are so close, there may not be much difference between Hubble and Webb.
The theory is that it was Cosmic Inflation which resulted in the size of the Know Universe being significantly larger than 13.8bn LY across.
Yes.
Sounds like upgrading from a HD TV to a 4K TV.
By my calculations, our 'universe' is due to hit the sides of it's test tube soon.
Username checks out.
It will come, and it will be impressive.
More likely in the stages of going to war with each other.
What happens if we expand into a Universe which has only Strange matter?
I guess it is a bit like our ancestors 500 years ago who did not have a full comprehension of Planet Earth.I always get reminded of Carl Sagans pale blue dot when looking at images of the vastness of space. So beautiful but also does reduce ones sense of worth
Really sad that we live in between the generations where we are aware of the wonders of space and can see them in detail, but don't have the technology to explore them yet. Wonder if one would rather live in ignorance of these wonders so you don't feel a sense of wanting to explore them, but know you can't.
