I would go out on a limb and say that at this point in scientific history, no telescope can ever capture a deep space image that is self-evidently important to the layperson. The best findings of this scope will not be appreciable to most of us by looking at the images, the experience will need to be mediated by nerds.
One thing I do wonder, will JWST be of any utility in getting extreme close-ups of solar system objects?
But is that what’s happening? As I understand it, the point of this thread is not to judge the achievement itself but to judge the press conference announcing it.
I think all galaxies at that distance would be red-shifted. The only blue-shifted ones that I know of are fairly local and so are blue-shifting because their relative motion to us that overwhelms the effect of the expanding universe.
Mostly though, we have widescale red-shifting of the distant and ancient galaxies due to things being further away and so moving away from us at a faster rate (i.e. Hubble’s law)
That is all much simplified of course. I suspect that those blue galaxies are young, big and hot. It may also be that even though a galaxy appears blue, if it is far away it will still be red-shifted and though apparently blue it appears less blue than it actually is/was.
But they didn’t put it into context. If you’re a space nerd and already understand why these images are significant, they’re very cool, but anyone who wasn’t intimiately familiar with Webb was left thinking “wait, what’s the big deal? This looks like those hubble photos”
The best thing they could’ve done was to explain how far away the galaxy cluster imaged by the JWST is, and how much further that is than what the Hubble deep fields can see. They could’ve explained that this is a further, smaller slice of sky we were seeing compared to the Hubble in far more detail. Note that we’re looking at 12 days of Hubble exposure vs 12 hours of Webb. They could’ve lead up to this by showing the same area photographed by the Hubble, and then revealing the JWST of the same area like this or or this.
Revealing it without context just made people who didn’t understand what it is say “oh, huh, that’s it? I guess I expected more”, but revealing it after explaining and showing what Hubble could do would’ve been much more dramatic. It would’ve had “wow” factor that the presentation, as-is-, lacked.
It was also stunning that they didn’t realize that people would want to look at the image full screen and never showed it that way.
Neither Biden nor the Nasa administrator guy was very charismatic and seemed unprepared. This is one of the biggest scientific missions of all time - we can’t find someone who can talk enthusiastically and charismatically about it?
This was an opportunity to really get the public interested in science and it was squandered with bad PR/bad presentation.
My comment isn’t directed at this thread, but the general public, which is obsessed with instant gratification instead of substance.
The impact of something like Webb can be to inspire and interest people in science. You’re essentially gatekeeping by saying “it should be bad and boring and you should like it otherwise you’re just looking for instant gratification”
There’s nothing better about having a poor presentation of the Webb achievements. You’re just using this as an excuse to spring into a “kids these days” rant.
You get the employees you pay for.
NASA is full of enthusiastic employees who believe in the mission and many of whom choose to forgo more money in favor of scientific discovery but if you want a charismatic spokesperson who can describe the science and why it’s cool or interesting, you’re going to have to compete with the tech companies or even some universities and others who can pay better and NASA’s budget has been mostly a flyspeck for the last 2 generations.
Exactly. Science should be presented in an interesting and accessible way. It’s unfortunate that too many people will not understand the importance because a presentation wasn’t flashy enough.
I don’t think anyone is saying, here or elsewhere, that it’s good that the presentation was so boring. Amazing science data is good. Amazing science data that’s presented in such a way that the general public can appreciate how amazing it is is even better.
I took this as sort of sneering at people who want a nice presentation because people of substance don’t need such things and can appreciate boring presentations just fine.
Someone on the NYT commented that the best viewing was of the audience full of astronomers that was watching the unveiling today, because when they “oohed” and clapped, it meant we were seeing something truly awesome, even if we don’t yet understand why.
I don’t think it works that way with light. It’s the dark spectral lines that are shifted to red or blue. The actual colour depends on temperature.
(IIRC from an Azimov essay i once read. I think Dopler made the same assumption)
Yeah, sometimes things are different colors just because they’re different colors. If you know you’re looking at certain spectral lines, then you can deduce the redshift from that, and two objects with the same actual temperature but different redshifts will look different colors, but you won’t be able to tell redshift just from the image (unless the image is processed to specifically show redshift, but that’s not what we’re seeing here).
Yeah, actually the more I think about this and read the comments, the more I see this point. Pay someone like Neil deGrasse Tyson whatever his fee is to bring some of the joy and excitement and context into the presentation. Pay someone to do some snazzier visuals: the comparison of Hubble vs JWST would have been great. It doesn’t have to be a full-on Fox sports NFL style visual assault of graphics or some Apple event, but something a little better than what looks to be a Power Point presentation at a board meeting.
Not a great presentation and oversold. Still, it’s important to somehow get this event out to the broader public, and especially the children whose interest today will one day take us to to the stars. I grew up in the era of the space race, the news coverage wasn’t really that great in retrospect but I feel sorry for the earlier generations who never saw rocket launches on TV, much less TV at all mostly. Sometimes they had nothing but cardboard models to explain what space craft were doing in space and they had some made-up explanations for how things like re-entry worked, but it was there, we all got to see the grainy pictures. Someone now is looking at the pictures and the spark of wonderment is giving life to their dreams.
Well, kinda sorta. Certainly an object that is very blue could be redshifted to a color other than ‘red’. The spectral line relationship is what will tell you if the reddish color is due to redshift or just the natural color of the object.
And young galaxies are bluer than old galaxies, because young ones have lots of hot blue young stars, but old dead galaxies wind up full of red dwarfs, which last a very long time. You could have a reddish galaxy closer than a bluer one. depending on age and star formation. This is especially true for local galaxies that are little affected by cosmological red shifting.
Still, the reddish galaxies you see in the image are almost certainly red-shifted and very far away.
The red shift in question isn’t due to speed through space, though, like a train whistle passing by an observer… It’s ‘cosmological red shifting’ due to the expansion of space itself. When space expands, the waves in it stretch, which lowers them in frequency. The galaxies farthest away from us have the most red shift because there is the most expanding space between us and them.
A good analogy: Take a rubber band, and mark some equally spaced dots on it. Now stretch the band. You’ll see that the dots closest to each other didn’t change their distance much, but as you go farther away from a dot the soace between them grows. that’s what happens in the Universe - as you look further away, items look more red-shifted. If you drew a wave between the center dot and each dot towards the edge, the longest-distance waves will be the most stretched out.
And in general, the further away they are, the younger they are as well, so more like to have more young and hot stars.
