Here’s a side by side of the old image vs the new image it has taken - the detail is sensational and it shows up other galaxies that were not seen before
They say that if you hold your arm out and lift your finger and put a grain of sand on it - this is what they have zoomed in on.
This makes it clearer
Someone made a video of the exact location it has zoomed on
Truly remarkable.
They hope to be able to see further back in time to the first light ever created in the universe. After all it has taken 14 billion (circa) years to reach here and it’s still going.
What an incredible project.
The other things it will be able to do is study the atmosphere of Goldilocks Planets (just in the right conditions away from a star to have habitable life) and be able to know the composition of the atmosphere.
When you’re looking at the image on the bottom photo as far as I am aware the galaxies that in red are the furthest away - that’s why they haven’t shown up on other photos - too far.
Incredible images. Gravitational lensing is clear to see and the light from some of those galaxies has been travelling since before the Earth was even formed …
All those lights, traveling all that distance, for all this time, all their sources dead in dark space now.
In all those galaxies, all of those possible civilizations long dead and gone.
Imagine if Earth is the Universe’s last hope…
…
Oh well. Nice try, Universe.
Yes indeed! Gravitational lensing as predicted by Einstein, where we see Galaxies behind others when the light is bent due to gravitational forces.
It’s incredible really.
Look how far out that video on Twitter zooms out… it’s crazy, it’s literally equivalent to a grain of sand, there must be 1000’s of galaxies, trillions of stars, billions of planets.
Yes, always going forward never in reverse! (If anyone remembers that quirky song from the 70’/80’s?)
That’s the thing about reaching other civilisation, it’s often noted that there could have been billions of civilisations that never encountered another due to the sheer size and how old the universe is.
For example, this Solar System is only 4.5billion years old. They reckon the Sun will burn out supernova in about 4 billion years time, destroying everything.
But before this Sun (which is just star called Sun) what was here before? They reckon another solar system was in place before our one, which went supernova.
Not only that - they think there was at least 3 solar systems in place before our one formed. And when we eventually go Supernova - the process may well start all over again (actually it will start over again, no doubt about it).
Anyway - all those years, all those stars are long gone. It’s crazy to think of it like that.
In addition to the gravitational lensing and literally looking back in time several billion years, what I find interesting about this photo is that every dot (or smear from the lensing) is a separate galaxy, similar to our own but with first- or second-generation stars (as Smurf mentioned).
Our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains several hundred billion stars. Each of the galaxies in the photo likely contains similar numbers. In this photo, we’re seeing the light from trillions of stars.
As Smurf said, this image is of a section of the sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length. Move the telescope in any direction the equivalent of one of those grains of sand, and we’d see another image with thousands of galaxies.
The JWSP will help pin down the numbers, but astronomers estimate there are at least 170 billion galaxies in the universe and possibly up to two trillion of them. In other words, there are ~1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (several hundred billion trillion) stars in the universe and, more than likely, several times that many.
You likely already knew this, but the hexagonal JWST mirrors cause diffraction artifacts that become apparent when objects (like the foreground Milky Way stars) are overexposed. This will be an issue with all the JWST deep space images. I suppose software tricks could be used to remove them.
And that doesn’t touch on string theory’s mathematical predictions of a multi-dimensional multiverse composed of, perhaps, an infinite number of universes.
For example, the Southern Hemisphere’s Carina Nebula, which lies in our own galaxy. The image shows a section of the nebula that is 151 trillion kilometers (or 16 light years) wide.
WASP-96 b is one of more than 5,000 confirmed exoplanets in the Milky Way. Located roughly 1,150 light-years away in the southern-sky constellation Phoenix, it represents a type of gas giant that has no direct analog in our solar system. With a mass less than half that of Jupiter and a diameter 1.2 times greater, WASP-96 b is much puffier than any planet orbiting our Sun. And with a temperature greater than 1000°F, it is significantly hotter. WASP-96 b orbits extremely close to its Sun-like star, just one-ninth of the distance between Mercury and the Sun, completing one circuit every 3½ Earth-days.
“Located roughly 1,150 light-years away”
Basically means that it has taken light (traveling at 299,792,458 meters per second) 1,150 years to get here.
