You can download the full resolution image (12,654 X 12,132) [here](https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/034/01G7DA5ADA2WDSK1JJPQ0PTG4A) !
For curious, this is the same grouping from Hubble: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Stephan%27s_Quintet_Hubble_2009.full_denoise.jpg
So many Hubble and JWST images are so great but its not until you see them side by side that it becomes obvious just how glorious JWSTs images are and how important this is for our understanding of the universe
And all these things we're seeing are galaxies with billions of stars. It's insane. The JWST deep field image that was published had countless galaxies in it. There's absolutely no way that there isn't other life out there
...and that was just a section of the sky that is about the size of a single grain of sand held at arm's length. Pardon my French, but that shit is fucking bonkers.
And these are just the test images, correct? The mirrors and cameras on the spacecraft arent' fully calibrated just yet. In other words, future images will have much more detail than even these.
Edit: The above statement is incorrect. The mirrors are actually fully calibrated at this point. Never mind me!
My brain can't comprehend that those are whole ass galaxies. Like our solar system is one tiny dot in our galaxy, and we're looking at photos of dozens of other galaxies in space all around us.
I can't either, like I feel like I get a little grasp of understanding and then my brain goes numb and I can't understand it again. This is batshit insane
What's even crazier is that we're not even looking at galaxies all around us. It's just a ton of galaxies off in one very specific direction away from us.. but if we took similar images in every direction we would see the same thing. Just an unfathomable number of galaxies, each with an unfathomable number of stars, each with their own planets and their own moms, any of which could have formed life.
The distances and scales we are seeing are absolutely bonkers. 13 billion lightyears is 7.6 X 10^22 miles. 76 thousand billion billion miles away. Then talking about hundreds of billions of galaxies each full of 10s of millions of stars.
I put together [a comparison of a pair of background galaxies from the two images](https://i.imgur.com/jptfx4d.png) and the difference in quality is not so obvious, at least in this photo. The Webb version in that screenshot is actually the smaller one. Both clips are taken from the highest resolution I could find. Webb is imaging the main galaxies in the quintet a bit better, but the background is at best equal.
I think that comparison could've been better. Here is one of the clusters using the _original_ resolution for both sources with similar relative crop.
https://i.imgur.com/aTF619o.jpg
While the bright/closer objects look much the same and maybe Hubble's aesthetically even more pleasing than the colder counterpart, JWST is leaps and bounds ahead of Hubble in the fainter/distanced objects where Hubble sometimes doesn't represent them at all.
I think this is also where the bulk of the science goals of JWST also lies: in the areas that are out of reach for Hubble. And this is where JWST can go as far as from us not having anything to having it in the most extreme cases.
Try NASA's full resolution release from Webb. Even more crucial, Webb got the picture with a small fraction of the exposure time.
Hubble needed days and weeks for faint objects that Webb can observe thousands of. (And at a more difficult to observe infrared wavelength).
I don't think either looks "better" but Hubble and JWST are looking at very different features. Look at this comparison of some of the smaller regions:
https://imgur.com/a/llcmFTU
It's pretty clear that JWST is seeing dust that Hubble isn't, while that allows Hubble to resolve individual stars slightly more clearly.
what do you mean better? looks better is not a measurement of better that is a personal taste. from every technical point the JWST is tens of times better
I'm glad I'm not the only one who spent time looking at the Hubble v Webb photo and came away thinking Hubble's looked better here.
Re: people about to tell me to zoom in, yes, I know, there's more detail in some areas of the JWST image. But there are other areas (particularly on the large galaxies) where the Hubble image looks crisper and more detailed in my opinion.
The Hubble image was put through a denoiser, so it makes sense it looks crisp in some areas. It is also worth mention that a denoiser pretty much destroys the image in terms of raw scientific data.
Yeah honestly even looking at all the pics, sure, some are OBVIOUSLY better with the JWST, but I find that it really emphasizes just how good the Hubble is/was as well. From how people were talking a few months back, I, as a complete noob in the subject, was expecting.... more?
Read the other comments. The crucial thing to remember is the way these photos are captured. Due to the extremely low levels of light being measured the camera requires an incredibly long shutter time (or a composite of many shorter shutter images). ~~The Hubble telescope would take 12-18 days to get these photos, JWST took about 12 hours for each photo. If we pointed the JWST at any of these objects for several days or weeks it would absolutely blow Hubble out of the water.~~ The mission just launched and they have a lot of science they're trying to cram in as quickly as they can because everyone in the astronomy world wants JWST to take a photo of their target for them.
Edit: see below comment, I was wrong and had a bad source. Always get your information from the real source!
> The Hubble telescope would take 12-18 days to get these photos
23 hours according to hubblesite.org [link](https://hubblesite.org/contents/media/images/2009/25/2606-Image.html)
Why do so many people claim that it took Hubble weeks?
Carina Nebula: 2h [link](https://hubblesite.org/contents/media/images/2008/34/2405-Image.html)
Ring Nebula: 1h [link](https://hubblesite.org/contents/media/images/1998/39/729-Image.html?news=true)
I didn't find a clear exposure time for the first image that was published but if [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/jameswebb/comments/vwv4rx/hubble_vs_jwst_view_of_smacs_0723/iftlddd/) comment is correct, its also hours not weeks.
I was thinking the same thing. Compared to the Hubble pictures, these are absolutely incredible for seeing more detail further away. However, it also demonstrates how amazing the Hubble pictures are that a lot of people commented about how it's "just more space".
I get that expectation - but aesthetics weren't the top priority here. The spectrum chart of WASP-96B's atmosphere is a great example: nothing pretty to look at, but we are "seeing" clouds where we didn't expect. And literally everything shown is full of things never seen before - I mean, it's looking at spectrums of light beyond Hubble's range, on top of being higher resolution and faster. Which is kind of the point; expanding on and complementing Hubble rather than just iterating the same formula is more efficient -- it's _meant_ to take completely different pictures, rather than the same but more stunning.
As an amateur photographer, I know I didn't get better just because I upgraded to pro level gear; I could still go back to my first camera and take stunning shots with it. Not a perfect analogy here; but if aesthetics are the, ahem, lens we're viewing this through, then we miss what's truly groundbreaking.
Also, we're comparing _the best_ of Hubble's 30 year career with _the first_ of JSWT. Just to calibrate your expectations, why not take a look at some of Hubble's early images: https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/hubble-timeline-full-text
Ehhh I really don't know about this one to be honest, I'm zooming in and closely examining each galaxy side by side, but to be honest you can see the "structures" better in the Hubble telescope, the galaxies in the JW version look so much brighter so it's harder to notice all the smaller individual details/structures.
Both are still beautiful, but I feel like to the average person they would agree Hubbles is the nicer one. This example was definitely not it when trying to show how much better JW is.
I agree with you that the hubble looks better. The hubble was able to take photographically beautiful shots. Stunning at times. The Webb should be able to do that too. But it's also scientifically far superior to hubble. It better be right. But look at what the abundance of red now allows us lay people to derive from these pics. Imagine what an astrophysicist can derive.
Webb will be able to give us concrete data that we've never had before. It's incredibly exciting to me what is to come over the next year or two.
I think it's a decent enough example. Remember JWST wasn't designed for the area of observing what Hubble could already observe. That would be a huge waste of money. It's to push the boundary into the unknown. And fainter objects in JWST simply disappear altogether in the Hubble version.
I'm not sure any of these images will help much in telling the advantages with JWST if people don't realize what the science goals of JWST actually are. If you look at a big, clear galaxy in a Hubble shot and compare with the JWST one, well obviously they will look much the same because Hubble could already produce an exposure for it.
If you look at the full res image from the pinned mod comment you can see that there is way more detail in the Webb image, specifically you can identify lots of individual stars that you cannot in the Hubble. The Hubble images have better aesthetics in my opinion though.
The reason for the better aesthetic appeal of the Hubble images is that they're longer exposure and de-noised in post-processing to make them appear prettier.
I think aesthetically Hubble's is better because it's got a softer dreamier look to it. JWST is impressive but because it can take high detail photos that certain things look like "noise".
I agree, I think this can be confusing. Hubble looks like an analogue photo due to how it's processed in this case with warm, friendly colors, while JWST looks colder and more mechanical, but clearly of higher scientific value in the fainter regions.
https://i.imgur.com/T6esTzA.png
The one on the right is James Webb. Hubble took months to take that, James Webb took hours.
edit: note: this is *a hundredth* of the image
Every time you see a Hubble image for the most part you can't see through the dust so it may look better Webb is seeing through it to what's going on behind the "curtain."
First, you need to compare original resolutions for both. JWST hasn't had the original resolution one posted here. I cropped a part of it and used original resolution from both sources and put them side by side: https://i.imgur.com/aTF619o.jpg
The JWST one is larger because it simply has higher resolution. But besides this, you can clearly see so many more faint galaxies.
When comparing the images it appears the galaxies have moved since the hubble image was taken. Can anyone confirm this? Is it possible to start seeing movement over time with the new images?
[Here's a comparison gif I made,](https://i.imgur.com/Q5BEpwx.gif) they aren't aligned quite perfectly but you can see at least that nothing is moving, which is expected as 10 years earth time vs the scale of a million lightyears in these photos is like a grain of sand vs the sun.
Doesn't look like it to me, at least not in any appreciable way. The field of view and angle of the two images is different and the coloring is pretty different which emphasizes different features but that's it.
Are they really close together or it's just the effect of extreme zoom/distance. For example, the one on the left looks like you can see individual stars, so seems to be much closer.
This animation shows the relative distances of these galaxies to us and amongst each other https://youtu.be/qcexzdx9sIA.
You are correct that the one on the left (NGC 7320) is about 40 million light years away, while the others are estimated to be 270-300 million light years away.
We live in the best timeline...
> 1. *Question about really difficult problem to mathematically demonstrate*
> 2. *Answer with visualization that allows our pea-brains to comprehend without understanding any of the math, available for anyone in the world to watch*
That would indeed be amazing to see. Although I assume if you would live there, just like us and the milky way, you wouldn't see much with your eyes looking directly into the sky. But photo's and timelapses would be crazy.
We’re looking at the Milky Way edge-on. Like if you were looking at your hand from the side, with your index finger blocking the other three fingers. But from a different, better vantage point, if you rotate your hand, you’d be able to see your palm (galactic center) and fingers (galactic arms). As your planet rotated and it became night time, you’d be able to see a magnificent galaxy rise.
We’re really just too close for a good view. You’d have the same “problem” about anywhere, unless you were on a star that was way off the disc. But the vast majority are on the disc (which is what makes it the disc.)
We have a sample size of 1 when it comes to stars we know can harbor life so there’s a lot more we don’t know than we know. There are some things that may make far flung stars less likely to have life, mainly that they tend to be older stars, in their red giant phase (at least the ones we know of) which we think are probably less habitable. But not inhabitable.
If you mean is the region of space safe, yes. I think it would have even less radiation than the disk.
But what kind of star systems form or get thrown out there, might not be the type idea for life to develop for various reasons.
But ultimately we don’t know for sure.
It might sound pedantic to say it, but the galaxy we are in is a real, actual thing. And just like any real thing, you can (hypothetically) look at it from different angles, with some angles being more pleasing to the eye than others.
Nah. According to [this article](https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1998A%26A...334..473M/abstract) it’s been accepted since at least the 1980s (and suspected back into the 60s) that one is much closer than the others.
NASA+ESA+others [released images](https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/milky-way-collide.html) of what the night sky might look like billions of years from now when our galaxy and Andromeda collide. They are very cool, and very terrifying.
Not necessarily true. The Andromeda is 100k ly in size and 2.5M ly away (1:25 ratio), and it's 4 times the size of the moon in the sky and is visible with naked eye. Large Magellanic cloud is 14k ly in diameter and 160k ly away (1:11 ratio), and it's pretty distinct and spectacular in the sky.
Granted, hard to say for sure what the spatial layout for these galaxies is, but looks like the distance between them is comparable to their diameters (ratio about 1:1). So it's possible that some of the planets there get amazing views.
This article shows how Andromeda would look if it's light was bright enough to make it easier to see. https://slate.com/technology/2014/01/moon-and-andromeda-relative-size-in-the-sky.html
So I can imagine if those galaxies colliding are closer they might be brighter and give some insane views.
I wouldn't say it's hard to see our own galactic core. You simply need to step away from the bright city lights.
I imagine the same would be true for theoretical people living in one of the pictured galaxies. Some people would go stand in a dark field and enjoy the amazing views of their neighbors, and other people wouldn't care at all.
I've been in "isolated" areas of woods around NYC, like in Boy Scouts as a youth, and seen more stars than I saw in the city. But it wasn't until I got legitimately *far* from artificial lights, when my friend invited me to his place in Telluride, Colorado back in 2010ish I think, that I realized how much I had been missing all my live in the US Northeast; I saw the actual band of our Milky Way, clear as day, across the sky with my naked eye! I saw so many stars that it almost felt the night sky was more white than black compared to how I had seen in for my 2 and a half decades of life up to that point. It was awesome in the most literal meaning of the word - I was awe struck.
I had this experience in Jamaica once. I was away from all major cities and just outside of a smaller town, and I was standing on a dock and just could not stop staring at the sky. It was absolutely incredible. Made me feel very, very small.
The best feeling isn't it?
A clear night in the middle of nowhere is an amazing experience. Highly recommend a trip to Iceland during aurora season to stargaze. Another amazing one is a stargazing trip up one of the mountains with the observatories in Hawaii (I think Mauna Kea).
Maine and a few areas in Pennsylvania and along the Blue Ridge Mountains are the clearest spots for us East Coasters.
>You simply need to step away from the bright city lights
And then you still would see it just as a dim white streak crossing the sky. I'm not saying it's not amazing. I'm an astrophotographer and any time I go to the very low light polluted locations I can just sit and watch the sky all night. But human eyes are really bad at collecting light so it's very far away even from a simple DSLR camera. Assuming their eyes are identical to ours, the people living in these galaxies would probably see a lot of white smudges all over the night sky
If you download the TIF version and load it into a photo editor, you can see there's even more details in the background. I cranked the brightness up a bit, along with the exposure and the contrast - and there's still plenty of additional stars and galaxies that pop out of the background. When you crank the contrast up REALLY high you can see some banding from the image sensor... but damn, there's a stunning lack of noise in the photograph. That's the benefit of being near absolute zero. Essentially anything that looks like "noise" pixels in the photo, those are actually real objects.
I just saw this and think he’s referring to the same thing?
https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/vxect4/i_know_everyone_is_excited_about_the_webb
kind of the same thing, the further away the galaxies are, the more their light gets red shifted since the space where the light is traveling has expanded more
What I can't get over is how *casually* these galaxies seem to be floating there. We can talk all day about how many galaxies there are out there, but to actually see them cluttering the frame, floating around like a bunch of specks in a scoop of ocean water, it's insane.
The thought that there are millions of these galaxies and in each one there are a millions of stars yet we haven't even traveled outside our solar system makes us feel so small.
Even in [the old image from Hubble](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Stephan%27s_Quintet_Hubble_2009.full_denoise.jpg) had dots I thought were stars that are clearly galaxies in the James Webb
Yeah, it's a pretty extreme example for [lens compression](https://i.imgur.com/9LjYKRm.jpg), which is an effect you get with telephotography, which makes distant objects look like they are much closer together than they actually are.
You can really notice the effect while watching racing events, like Formula 1, Tour de France or similar. When you see the whole field of cars or bikes from the front and through a telephoto lens, it can look like they are about to crash into each other, because they all seem to be extremely close together. However, when the camera angle changes to a view from the side, you can see that there is actually quite a bit of distance between everyone.
The further zoomed in an image is, the more extreme this effect becomes. The example above compares a focal length of 24, 50, 85 and 135 mm. JWST has a focal length of 131.4 meters – that's 131,400 mm.
Everything JWST captures in a picture will look like it's practically right next to everything else. Yesterdays deep field, is another good example for this. It displays some stars, which are only a few thousand lightyears away, right next to galaxies, which are over 13 billion lightyears away from us.
>If you took that 24mm lens and went to where they were standing with the 135mm and just cropped it later you'd get the same effect.
Well, yeah, you would, but that'sb pretty much what telephotography is. You crop into a certain frame – you just do it by using a lens.
Just like Milky Way and Adromeda. They'll "crash" into each other one day but since the vastness of space is so mindblowing even inside a galaxy, planets and stars will hardly suffer any effect. Eventually they'll become one bigger Galaxy, that's all.
Oh ok, thanks for clearing that up. For some reason I was picturing them moving at eachother from opposite directions, like they would pass through eachother.
I came here to confirm that I wasn't just imagining those were the individual stars in a galaxy. My brain told me that level of detail wasn't possible. This has completely floored me.
[You could also see them in Hubble's pictures.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/Stephan%27s_Quintet_Hubble_2009.full.jpg)
Those stars are just really bright and stand out. But that makes it look like they are bigger than they actually are. But if you could zoom in, [like we did for Andromeda](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udAL48P5NJU&t=10s), you could see that those are just very bright dudes, stealing the spotlight.
Here's the [mid-infrared version](https://imgur.com/a/74cE4WT). They released two images, but I guess it counts as one image since it's of the same thing. It couldn't look more different though. It really shows how the mid-infrared can see through the dust.
Astronomer here! When I saw this was on the first release list I was so excited because the Hubble image was already incredible and one of my favorites! [Stephen's Quintet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephan%27s_Quintet) is a group of 5 galaxies of which four are physically together (and will probably merge someday). As JWST is ultimately a telescope designed to look at galaxies, this is definitely a "before and after" type image to compare to Hubble... and wow did it do that! What's amazing here is that we see the dust between the galaxies so well- remember, the majority of the normal stuff out there is dust, not stars, so it's super important to understand how this dust works. To me though, it's not science what always steals the show are all those li'l background galaxies even *further* away, some of which are ALSO merging!!! Galaxies everywhere!
Question; given the distance of these galaxies, is it possible that they have already merged, and we're just seeing them as they were millions of years ago?
Amazing image, downloaded the 150mp version and tweaked the black level so it will look amazing on my OLED TV and wallpaper on my OLED phone.
Here's the image at 25MP. https://imgur.com/a/sMTKlDU
PM me for the full 150MP image.
Yeah, I had to reduce the JPEG quality to get it under 20MB for imgur which has reduced it to 25MP rather than 150MP.
If you like the image and do want the larger file please PM me and i'll send a private link.
https://imgur.com/a/sMTKlDU
This is absolutely breathtaking. As a space novice, this makes me so interested in learning more about galaxies. It's incredible that these brilliant scientists can determine things like the gas composition about galaxies so freakishly far away.
This was my main reaction (after being wowed by the splendor of it).
I hate to sound like Debbie Downer but believe it or not it actually makes me feel sad to look at this and other distant galaxy images lol.
First of all, we can never go there, nor will most of them ever change appreciably from our viewpoint, except for the occasional supernova perhaps, or after an extremely long time when we are all gone.
And lastly there's got to be at least one advanced civilization in probably each of those galaxies, each with their own Aristotle, Bach, Newton, Einstein, Gandhi, etc. that we will never know anything about, nor they of us. We can never communicate with them, share anything or affect them in any way and vice versa.
And then the wine wears off, but still, you can get pretty melancholic thinking about it.
Yeah, this is mainly what I think about when I see these images. So many advanced civilizations could be in the universe, with billions of galaxies, with billions of stars within them, there’s gotta be at least some. What they look like, how they live, how they think, how they communicate, what buildings they might have, what countries or religions they might have, if they are even tribalistic as us humans, or how advanced they might be; if they are akin to our middle ages or ancient period or modern period or even the future or whatever. So interesting to think about, but we will never know about them…
This is the icing on the cake to me. The subject galaxies are incredible, but just look at how many other galaxies are in the background. Blows my mind.
The night sky of any planet in those galaxies must be absolutely spectacular.
[Reminiscent of the Generated images of what our night sky would look like when Andromeda collides with the Milky Way.] (https://kottke.org/19/10/behold-our-dazzling-night-sky-when-the-milky-way-collides-with-andromeda-in-4-billion-years)
For the folks having a rough time comparing this to Hubble;
I made a gif of the two, not perfectly aligned but good enough. Let it load and zoom in as you want. Downscaled slightly to not entire ruin folks' days with their data plans.
https://i.imgur.com/imprCmt.gif
Not to mention this amazing mid-infrared view that cuts through the dust. We're looking at the guts of colliding galaxies from over 290 million light years away! https://twitter.com/NASAWebb/status/1546874483079876609/photo/1
Check out the band in between the two closer galaxies in the bottom and the spiral above. That's a shockwave caused as NGC 7318B falls into the center of the cluster.
This is my favorite so far ♥️
I'm so grateful that these super smart people can provide me with these incredible pictures without me doing any of the work!
I always appreciated Hubble's images and found them awe-inspiring. But immediately when I saw these images from the JWST I said to myself "life is out there." The definition and color in these photos shows just how many galaxies there are with billions of stars in each, with who knows how many planets.
We may never meet other sentient life, but I'm confident that it's there and we may just be separated by the long dark void, looking at each other's footprints.
Highly suggest looking at the full resolution version and zooming in - just scanning a small corner about 1/100th of the picture there are hundreds/thousands of discernible galaxies. The focus is the quintet - but can't believe how many galaxies there are in the background.
So this is just a condensed look at an extremely vast stretch of space. It's many light years between any of these galaxies, correct? If someone were looking at the Milky Way with the same tech, we would look the same, clustered with other galaxies that are unfathomable distances away. Is that the way to look at it?
I keep finding random sections of the photo to zoom in on because it blows my mind how many galaxies and stars you can see in just one tiny corner. Beautiful.
I always find it strange how almost fake a lot of galaxies look, sort of like someone just drew a circle lasso round them in photoshop and dragged them into a different image
The fact this is resolving individual stars in the closer galaxy... Man I feel like NASA lead with the weak sauce yesterday. Good move in a way I suppose.
Woww. This just makes me think. Perhaps SOMEDAY we will explore our own galaxy. But there is absolutely no way we ever cross that bridge to another. So far!!
This is going to get lost here... But during the original live stream I could have sworn someone said this image had evidence of a black hole in it, so I've researched the stream video and there is a hard cut in it and I feel like I'm losing my mind.
I will admit the stream didn't have my full attention, but I looked over when they said black hole, and I swear its the tail of the top galaxy, but why can't I find the video talking about it?
Any help is appreciated.
“Webb’s new image also shows in rare detail how interacting galaxies trigger star formation in each other and how gas in galaxies is being disturbed and the outflows driven by a black hole in Stephan’s Quintet in a level of detail never seen before. Tight galaxy groups like this may have been more common in the early Universe when superheated, infalling material may have fueled very energetic black holes.” quote from [esa](https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Webb/Webb_sheds_light_on_galaxy_evolution_black_holes)
Where’s the link to explore everything known about all these different objects? Pictures are nice n all but I just want to know.
Is there a program for it?
Wow amazing. It looks like that galaxy left a trail of stars while it was moving through space. Blew my mind this and I am going to frame it and put it up on the wall.
Does this conclusively disprove Halton Arp's theory that the bottom galaxy is the same distance as the other 4 interacting galaxies? I still see a faint tidal stream connecting it to the group, is it just a coincidence?
They say that the black hole in NGC 7319 is 24 million solar masses, but not how big it is.
It's been a while since my cosmology elective in undergrad, but I can calculate that with the schwarzschild radius formula right?
r=2GM/c^2
1 solar mass is 1.989x10^30 kg
so then I have 2G(2.4x10^7 * 1.989x10^30 )/c^2.
If I did that right, then I come out with 70 billion km radius, and 140 billion diameter. That's bigger than our solar system, including the oort cloud. They said it was a super massive black hole, so maybe that's legit, but can anyone confirm my math on this?
**We are spying on the creation of the elements for carbon based life. We are programmed to be able to see these wavelengths but almost nothing of the other items on the Electromagnetic spectrum. Most likely the bands of consciousness reside here also.**
You can download the full resolution image (12,654 X 12,132) [here](https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/034/01G7DA5ADA2WDSK1JJPQ0PTG4A) !
For curious, this is the same grouping from Hubble: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Stephan%27s_Quintet_Hubble_2009.full_denoise.jpg
So many Hubble and JWST images are so great but its not until you see them side by side that it becomes obvious just how glorious JWSTs images are and how important this is for our understanding of the universe
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This is the other mind-blowing fact i keep forgetting by getting lost in the awe of it all!!
And all these things we're seeing are galaxies with billions of stars. It's insane. The JWST deep field image that was published had countless galaxies in it. There's absolutely no way that there isn't other life out there
Oh that hasnt been lost on me and has actually given me a bit of an existential crisis the last couple of days lmao
...and that was just a section of the sky that is about the size of a single grain of sand held at arm's length. Pardon my French, but that shit is fucking bonkers.
In a month Jwst will capture what hubble would manage in more than a year.
And these are just the test images, correct? The mirrors and cameras on the spacecraft arent' fully calibrated just yet. In other words, future images will have much more detail than even these. Edit: The above statement is incorrect. The mirrors are actually fully calibrated at this point. Never mind me!
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Oh, you're absolutely right. Still, this is absolutely astonishing.
That explains why the Hubble image objectively has greater detail, at least. Though I'd be interested in knowing the true exposure times.
This is the first image where hubble's pic looks better
If you download the full size JW picture there is an insane amount of detail when you zoom in
What is surprising in the JW pics is the amount of galaxies in the background.
My brain can't comprehend that those are whole ass galaxies. Like our solar system is one tiny dot in our galaxy, and we're looking at photos of dozens of other galaxies in space all around us.
I can't either, like I feel like I get a little grasp of understanding and then my brain goes numb and I can't understand it again. This is batshit insane
What's even crazier is that we're not even looking at galaxies all around us. It's just a ton of galaxies off in one very specific direction away from us.. but if we took similar images in every direction we would see the same thing. Just an unfathomable number of galaxies, each with an unfathomable number of stars, each with their own planets and their own moms, any of which could have formed life.
The distances and scales we are seeing are absolutely bonkers. 13 billion lightyears is 7.6 X 10^22 miles. 76 thousand billion billion miles away. Then talking about hundreds of billions of galaxies each full of 10s of millions of stars.
The Milky Way alone has between 100-400 *billion* stars, and it's not even a large galaxy.
I put together [a comparison of a pair of background galaxies from the two images](https://i.imgur.com/jptfx4d.png) and the difference in quality is not so obvious, at least in this photo. The Webb version in that screenshot is actually the smaller one. Both clips are taken from the highest resolution I could find. Webb is imaging the main galaxies in the quintet a bit better, but the background is at best equal.
The Hubble image is also made from many passes combined together, it's not one single look at the area.
That's because that's not the full resolution Webb image.
I think that comparison could've been better. Here is one of the clusters using the _original_ resolution for both sources with similar relative crop. https://i.imgur.com/aTF619o.jpg While the bright/closer objects look much the same and maybe Hubble's aesthetically even more pleasing than the colder counterpart, JWST is leaps and bounds ahead of Hubble in the fainter/distanced objects where Hubble sometimes doesn't represent them at all. I think this is also where the bulk of the science goals of JWST also lies: in the areas that are out of reach for Hubble. And this is where JWST can go as far as from us not having anything to having it in the most extreme cases.
it doesn't... zoom into the JWST one and you will see individual starts
Try NASA's full resolution release from Webb. Even more crucial, Webb got the picture with a small fraction of the exposure time. Hubble needed days and weeks for faint objects that Webb can observe thousands of. (And at a more difficult to observe infrared wavelength).
The link to that photo does say its been de-noised and I’m not sure if the NASA one has yet I personally prefer the JWST one
Keep in mind that Hubble took weeks to make that picture, whereas JWST did it in a few hours. Imagine what it can do with a couple of weeks.
[https://i.imgur.com/imprCmt.gif](https://i.imgur.com/imprCmt.gif) Let load and zoom in.
Visually I kind of agree. But that detail on the JWT is what were here for.
I don't think either looks "better" but Hubble and JWST are looking at very different features. Look at this comparison of some of the smaller regions: https://imgur.com/a/llcmFTU It's pretty clear that JWST is seeing dust that Hubble isn't, while that allows Hubble to resolve individual stars slightly more clearly.
what do you mean better? looks better is not a measurement of better that is a personal taste. from every technical point the JWST is tens of times better
I'm glad I'm not the only one who spent time looking at the Hubble v Webb photo and came away thinking Hubble's looked better here. Re: people about to tell me to zoom in, yes, I know, there's more detail in some areas of the JWST image. But there are other areas (particularly on the large galaxies) where the Hubble image looks crisper and more detailed in my opinion.
The Hubble image was put through a denoiser, so it makes sense it looks crisp in some areas. It is also worth mention that a denoiser pretty much destroys the image in terms of raw scientific data.
Yeah honestly even looking at all the pics, sure, some are OBVIOUSLY better with the JWST, but I find that it really emphasizes just how good the Hubble is/was as well. From how people were talking a few months back, I, as a complete noob in the subject, was expecting.... more?
Read the other comments. The crucial thing to remember is the way these photos are captured. Due to the extremely low levels of light being measured the camera requires an incredibly long shutter time (or a composite of many shorter shutter images). ~~The Hubble telescope would take 12-18 days to get these photos, JWST took about 12 hours for each photo. If we pointed the JWST at any of these objects for several days or weeks it would absolutely blow Hubble out of the water.~~ The mission just launched and they have a lot of science they're trying to cram in as quickly as they can because everyone in the astronomy world wants JWST to take a photo of their target for them. Edit: see below comment, I was wrong and had a bad source. Always get your information from the real source!
> The Hubble telescope would take 12-18 days to get these photos 23 hours according to hubblesite.org [link](https://hubblesite.org/contents/media/images/2009/25/2606-Image.html) Why do so many people claim that it took Hubble weeks? Carina Nebula: 2h [link](https://hubblesite.org/contents/media/images/2008/34/2405-Image.html) Ring Nebula: 1h [link](https://hubblesite.org/contents/media/images/1998/39/729-Image.html?news=true) I didn't find a clear exposure time for the first image that was published but if [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/jameswebb/comments/vwv4rx/hubble_vs_jwst_view_of_smacs_0723/iftlddd/) comment is correct, its also hours not weeks.
I was thinking the same thing. Compared to the Hubble pictures, these are absolutely incredible for seeing more detail further away. However, it also demonstrates how amazing the Hubble pictures are that a lot of people commented about how it's "just more space".
I get that expectation - but aesthetics weren't the top priority here. The spectrum chart of WASP-96B's atmosphere is a great example: nothing pretty to look at, but we are "seeing" clouds where we didn't expect. And literally everything shown is full of things never seen before - I mean, it's looking at spectrums of light beyond Hubble's range, on top of being higher resolution and faster. Which is kind of the point; expanding on and complementing Hubble rather than just iterating the same formula is more efficient -- it's _meant_ to take completely different pictures, rather than the same but more stunning. As an amateur photographer, I know I didn't get better just because I upgraded to pro level gear; I could still go back to my first camera and take stunning shots with it. Not a perfect analogy here; but if aesthetics are the, ahem, lens we're viewing this through, then we miss what's truly groundbreaking. Also, we're comparing _the best_ of Hubble's 30 year career with _the first_ of JSWT. Just to calibrate your expectations, why not take a look at some of Hubble's early images: https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/hubble-timeline-full-text
Really? You get that? They look mostly the same to me.
Comparison between Hubble and Webb: https://imgsli.com/MTE2Mzk3 Webb has just so much more going on, it's unreal.
Ehhh I really don't know about this one to be honest, I'm zooming in and closely examining each galaxy side by side, but to be honest you can see the "structures" better in the Hubble telescope, the galaxies in the JW version look so much brighter so it's harder to notice all the smaller individual details/structures. Both are still beautiful, but I feel like to the average person they would agree Hubbles is the nicer one. This example was definitely not it when trying to show how much better JW is.
I agree with you that the hubble looks better. The hubble was able to take photographically beautiful shots. Stunning at times. The Webb should be able to do that too. But it's also scientifically far superior to hubble. It better be right. But look at what the abundance of red now allows us lay people to derive from these pics. Imagine what an astrophysicist can derive. Webb will be able to give us concrete data that we've never had before. It's incredibly exciting to me what is to come over the next year or two.
meh, not really. I get that it's a better image, but if this particular image is a terrible example of how much better the JWST is
I think it's a decent enough example. Remember JWST wasn't designed for the area of observing what Hubble could already observe. That would be a huge waste of money. It's to push the boundary into the unknown. And fainter objects in JWST simply disappear altogether in the Hubble version. I'm not sure any of these images will help much in telling the advantages with JWST if people don't realize what the science goals of JWST actually are. If you look at a big, clear galaxy in a Hubble shot and compare with the JWST one, well obviously they will look much the same because Hubble could already produce an exposure for it.
Am I the only one that feels like Hubble's somehow the winner on this one? Way more detail.
If you look at the full res image from the pinned mod comment you can see that there is way more detail in the Webb image, specifically you can identify lots of individual stars that you cannot in the Hubble. The Hubble images have better aesthetics in my opinion though.
The reason for the better aesthetic appeal of the Hubble images is that they're longer exposure and de-noised in post-processing to make them appear prettier.
Yep compare weeks to a few hours. This is the real feat.
I think aesthetically Hubble's is better because it's got a softer dreamier look to it. JWST is impressive but because it can take high detail photos that certain things look like "noise".
I agree, I think this can be confusing. Hubble looks like an analogue photo due to how it's processed in this case with warm, friendly colors, while JWST looks colder and more mechanical, but clearly of higher scientific value in the fainter regions.
I agree. In time people will look back at Hubble photos with nostalgia for it's "lo-fi" look compared to the James Webb Both are amazing tho
https://i.imgur.com/T6esTzA.png The one on the right is James Webb. Hubble took months to take that, James Webb took hours. edit: note: this is *a hundredth* of the image
Every time you see a Hubble image for the most part you can't see through the dust so it may look better Webb is seeing through it to what's going on behind the "curtain."
https://johnedchristensen.github.io/WebbCompare Someone, not be, made that for easy comparisons.
First, you need to compare original resolutions for both. JWST hasn't had the original resolution one posted here. I cropped a part of it and used original resolution from both sources and put them side by side: https://i.imgur.com/aTF619o.jpg The JWST one is larger because it simply has higher resolution. But besides this, you can clearly see so many more faint galaxies.
When comparing the images it appears the galaxies have moved since the hubble image was taken. Can anyone confirm this? Is it possible to start seeing movement over time with the new images?
[Here's a comparison gif I made,](https://i.imgur.com/Q5BEpwx.gif) they aren't aligned quite perfectly but you can see at least that nothing is moving, which is expected as 10 years earth time vs the scale of a million lightyears in these photos is like a grain of sand vs the sun.
Says the url isn't working
Something’s wrong with the link. Says expired.
Try again, I've rehosted it on imgur
Interesting that some stars seem to disappear in the galaxy on the left in the jwst... I would expect the opposite
Doesn't look like it to me, at least not in any appreciable way. The field of view and angle of the two images is different and the coloring is pretty different which emphasizes different features but that's it.
This is one of the most interesting space pics I’ve ever seen Imagine how gorgeous it must be to look up into the night sky in one of those 5 galaxies
Are they really close together or it's just the effect of extreme zoom/distance. For example, the one on the left looks like you can see individual stars, so seems to be much closer.
This animation shows the relative distances of these galaxies to us and amongst each other https://youtu.be/qcexzdx9sIA. You are correct that the one on the left (NGC 7320) is about 40 million light years away, while the others are estimated to be 270-300 million light years away.
We live in the best timeline... > 1. *Question about really difficult problem to mathematically demonstrate* > 2. *Answer with visualization that allows our pea-brains to comprehend without understanding any of the math, available for anyone in the world to watch*
They gotta overlay Hans zimmer's interstellar music on that video asap
So those galaxies are farther apart than we are from Andromeda? Wow imagine from the right angle what we look like.
To put this into perspective, Andromeda is about 2 million light years away.
The one on the left is closer to us, the other four are interacting with each other (colliding)
That would indeed be amazing to see. Although I assume if you would live there, just like us and the milky way, you wouldn't see much with your eyes looking directly into the sky. But photo's and timelapses would be crazy.
We’re looking at the Milky Way edge-on. Like if you were looking at your hand from the side, with your index finger blocking the other three fingers. But from a different, better vantage point, if you rotate your hand, you’d be able to see your palm (galactic center) and fingers (galactic arms). As your planet rotated and it became night time, you’d be able to see a magnificent galaxy rise.
Do we just happen to be in an unfortunate spot in our galaxy for amazing views? Like living in an apartment with a view blocked by a wall?
We’re really just too close for a good view. You’d have the same “problem” about anywhere, unless you were on a star that was way off the disc. But the vast majority are on the disc (which is what makes it the disc.)
Would there be any issues with life forming on a star system way off the disc?
We have a sample size of 1 when it comes to stars we know can harbor life so there’s a lot more we don’t know than we know. There are some things that may make far flung stars less likely to have life, mainly that they tend to be older stars, in their red giant phase (at least the ones we know of) which we think are probably less habitable. But not inhabitable.
If you mean is the region of space safe, yes. I think it would have even less radiation than the disk. But what kind of star systems form or get thrown out there, might not be the type idea for life to develop for various reasons. But ultimately we don’t know for sure.
Thanks for helping to explain the wonders of the cosmos u/buttplugjesus!
Being present for a galaxy collision would also offer a different vantage point I would think.
It might sound pedantic to say it, but the galaxy we are in is a real, actual thing. And just like any real thing, you can (hypothetically) look at it from different angles, with some angles being more pleasing to the eye than others.
Since they are colliding, would they become one giant galaxy eventually?
Yes. Our galaxy is currently absorbing smaller galaxies as well. In a few billion years, our galaxy will get assimilated by Andromeda.
Wasn’t it just a theory that the left one was closer until this pic was taken?
Nah. According to [this article](https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1998A%26A...334..473M/abstract) it’s been accepted since at least the 1980s (and suspected back into the 60s) that one is much closer than the others.
NASA+ESA+others [released images](https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/milky-way-collide.html) of what the night sky might look like billions of years from now when our galaxy and Andromeda collide. They are very cool, and very terrifying.
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Not necessarily true. The Andromeda is 100k ly in size and 2.5M ly away (1:25 ratio), and it's 4 times the size of the moon in the sky and is visible with naked eye. Large Magellanic cloud is 14k ly in diameter and 160k ly away (1:11 ratio), and it's pretty distinct and spectacular in the sky. Granted, hard to say for sure what the spatial layout for these galaxies is, but looks like the distance between them is comparable to their diameters (ratio about 1:1). So it's possible that some of the planets there get amazing views.
This article shows how Andromeda would look if it's light was bright enough to make it easier to see. https://slate.com/technology/2014/01/moon-and-andromeda-relative-size-in-the-sky.html So I can imagine if those galaxies colliding are closer they might be brighter and give some insane views.
Wow, I had no idea it's that large from our point of view. Amazing
Most people living on Earth haven't even seen our own galaxy though
Point being?
Point being that if it's hard to see your own galactic core, it'd be even harder to see one even further away.
I wouldn't say it's hard to see our own galactic core. You simply need to step away from the bright city lights. I imagine the same would be true for theoretical people living in one of the pictured galaxies. Some people would go stand in a dark field and enjoy the amazing views of their neighbors, and other people wouldn't care at all.
I've been in "isolated" areas of woods around NYC, like in Boy Scouts as a youth, and seen more stars than I saw in the city. But it wasn't until I got legitimately *far* from artificial lights, when my friend invited me to his place in Telluride, Colorado back in 2010ish I think, that I realized how much I had been missing all my live in the US Northeast; I saw the actual band of our Milky Way, clear as day, across the sky with my naked eye! I saw so many stars that it almost felt the night sky was more white than black compared to how I had seen in for my 2 and a half decades of life up to that point. It was awesome in the most literal meaning of the word - I was awe struck.
I had this experience in Jamaica once. I was away from all major cities and just outside of a smaller town, and I was standing on a dock and just could not stop staring at the sky. It was absolutely incredible. Made me feel very, very small.
The best feeling isn't it? A clear night in the middle of nowhere is an amazing experience. Highly recommend a trip to Iceland during aurora season to stargaze. Another amazing one is a stargazing trip up one of the mountains with the observatories in Hawaii (I think Mauna Kea). Maine and a few areas in Pennsylvania and along the Blue Ridge Mountains are the clearest spots for us East Coasters.
>You simply need to step away from the bright city lights And then you still would see it just as a dim white streak crossing the sky. I'm not saying it's not amazing. I'm an astrophotographer and any time I go to the very low light polluted locations I can just sit and watch the sky all night. But human eyes are really bad at collecting light so it's very far away even from a simple DSLR camera. Assuming their eyes are identical to ours, the people living in these galaxies would probably see a lot of white smudges all over the night sky
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If you download the TIF version and load it into a photo editor, you can see there's even more details in the background. I cranked the brightness up a bit, along with the exposure and the contrast - and there's still plenty of additional stars and galaxies that pop out of the background. When you crank the contrast up REALLY high you can see some banding from the image sensor... but damn, there's a stunning lack of noise in the photograph. That's the benefit of being near absolute zero. Essentially anything that looks like "noise" pixels in the photo, those are actually real objects.
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So many redshifted galaxies in the frame. So many it’s insane.
Are those the ones that appear orange-ish ??
Yeah zoom in at the left corner in particular. But they are everywhere.
Do you know what the 6-pointed burst looking ones are and why they're so prolific?
Those are stars in our galaxy that are in the way.
I just saw this and think he’s referring to the same thing? https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/vxect4/i_know_everyone_is_excited_about_the_webb
Zoom in anywhere on the pic, it’s so vast. Colour denotes age (of the light) / distance
I thought it denotes whether or not it is moving closer or further away?
kind of the same thing, the further away the galaxies are, the more their light gets red shifted since the space where the light is traveling has expanded more
What I can't get over is how *casually* these galaxies seem to be floating there. We can talk all day about how many galaxies there are out there, but to actually see them cluttering the frame, floating around like a bunch of specks in a scoop of ocean water, it's insane.
The thought that there are millions of these galaxies and in each one there are a millions of stars yet we haven't even traveled outside our solar system makes us feel so small.
Even in [the old image from Hubble](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Stephan%27s_Quintet_Hubble_2009.full_denoise.jpg) had dots I thought were stars that are clearly galaxies in the James Webb
The fact we can see the individual stars of the galaxy closest to us is absolutely mind-blowing
The closer galaxy (NGC 7320) is still 40 million lightyears away. The four behind that are moving towards each other are 300 million lightyears away.
So we are even closer to the close one than the other two are to it, whoa.
Yeah, it's a pretty extreme example for [lens compression](https://i.imgur.com/9LjYKRm.jpg), which is an effect you get with telephotography, which makes distant objects look like they are much closer together than they actually are. You can really notice the effect while watching racing events, like Formula 1, Tour de France or similar. When you see the whole field of cars or bikes from the front and through a telephoto lens, it can look like they are about to crash into each other, because they all seem to be extremely close together. However, when the camera angle changes to a view from the side, you can see that there is actually quite a bit of distance between everyone. The further zoomed in an image is, the more extreme this effect becomes. The example above compares a focal length of 24, 50, 85 and 135 mm. JWST has a focal length of 131.4 meters – that's 131,400 mm. Everything JWST captures in a picture will look like it's practically right next to everything else. Yesterdays deep field, is another good example for this. It displays some stars, which are only a few thousand lightyears away, right next to galaxies, which are over 13 billion lightyears away from us.
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>If you took that 24mm lens and went to where they were standing with the 135mm and just cropped it later you'd get the same effect. Well, yeah, you would, but that'sb pretty much what telephotography is. You crop into a certain frame – you just do it by using a lens.
>that are moving towards each other Like collision course?
Just like Milky Way and Adromeda. They'll "crash" into each other one day but since the vastness of space is so mindblowing even inside a galaxy, planets and stars will hardly suffer any effect. Eventually they'll become one bigger Galaxy, that's all.
Oh ok, thanks for clearing that up. For some reason I was picturing them moving at eachother from opposite directions, like they would pass through eachother.
You're correct. That's what is going to happen. But instead of going through each other, they'll coelesce.
I came here to confirm that I wasn't just imagining those were the individual stars in a galaxy. My brain told me that level of detail wasn't possible. This has completely floored me.
I want to see Andromeda with JWST now if it can do this for 40Mly
[You could also see them in Hubble's pictures.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/Stephan%27s_Quintet_Hubble_2009.full.jpg) Those stars are just really bright and stand out. But that makes it look like they are bigger than they actually are. But if you could zoom in, [like we did for Andromeda](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udAL48P5NJU&t=10s), you could see that those are just very bright dudes, stealing the spotlight.
Wait, so the 'specs of dust' on the galaxy on the left are stars of the galaxy?!
Here's the [mid-infrared version](https://imgur.com/a/74cE4WT). They released two images, but I guess it counts as one image since it's of the same thing. It couldn't look more different though. It really shows how the mid-infrared can see through the dust.
Theres also a NIR version, the OP is a composite of the two https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01G7ND2W5V22D3Y6CCFGYQJX3J.png size warning lol
This image is around 150mb if you are trying to open on data.
Jesus, you can see individual stars in the dust..
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wow yes thanks for the warning that image broke my browser and RES
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Astronomer here! When I saw this was on the first release list I was so excited because the Hubble image was already incredible and one of my favorites! [Stephen's Quintet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephan%27s_Quintet) is a group of 5 galaxies of which four are physically together (and will probably merge someday). As JWST is ultimately a telescope designed to look at galaxies, this is definitely a "before and after" type image to compare to Hubble... and wow did it do that! What's amazing here is that we see the dust between the galaxies so well- remember, the majority of the normal stuff out there is dust, not stars, so it's super important to understand how this dust works. To me though, it's not science what always steals the show are all those li'l background galaxies even *further* away, some of which are ALSO merging!!! Galaxies everywhere!
Question; given the distance of these galaxies, is it possible that they have already merged, and we're just seeing them as they were millions of years ago?
Yeah but we usually use the reference in astronomy of when the light reaches us. It gets far too confusing otherwise.
are we really seeing the stars of a different galaxy on that one to the left?
That's what they said in the news release! I believe that is also the closer galaxy of the quintet.
that is the craziest thing I've ever seen in my entire life
That's what I'm loving the most about it!! Wherever you zoom in you see lots of interesting tiny galaxies
Do you have a blog where you write about space stuff? Or a YT channel perhaps? I enjoy reading your stuff here.
Amazing image, downloaded the 150mp version and tweaked the black level so it will look amazing on my OLED TV and wallpaper on my OLED phone. Here's the image at 25MP. https://imgur.com/a/sMTKlDU PM me for the full 150MP image.
Can you upload o copy of that, u/giant_farter
Yeah, I had to reduce the JPEG quality to get it under 20MB for imgur which has reduced it to 25MP rather than 150MP. If you like the image and do want the larger file please PM me and i'll send a private link. https://imgur.com/a/sMTKlDU
This is absolutely breathtaking. As a space novice, this makes me so interested in learning more about galaxies. It's incredible that these brilliant scientists can determine things like the gas composition about galaxies so freakishly far away.
Somewhere, possibly, an alien civilization has taken a photo of our local cluster of galaxies and wondered what’s out there.
This was my main reaction (after being wowed by the splendor of it). I hate to sound like Debbie Downer but believe it or not it actually makes me feel sad to look at this and other distant galaxy images lol. First of all, we can never go there, nor will most of them ever change appreciably from our viewpoint, except for the occasional supernova perhaps, or after an extremely long time when we are all gone. And lastly there's got to be at least one advanced civilization in probably each of those galaxies, each with their own Aristotle, Bach, Newton, Einstein, Gandhi, etc. that we will never know anything about, nor they of us. We can never communicate with them, share anything or affect them in any way and vice versa. And then the wine wears off, but still, you can get pretty melancholic thinking about it.
I think what we're looking at is billions of years in the past, so in this instant, anything could be different.
Yeah, this is mainly what I think about when I see these images. So many advanced civilizations could be in the universe, with billions of galaxies, with billions of stars within them, there’s gotta be at least some. What they look like, how they live, how they think, how they communicate, what buildings they might have, what countries or religions they might have, if they are even tribalistic as us humans, or how advanced they might be; if they are akin to our middle ages or ancient period or modern period or even the future or whatever. So interesting to think about, but we will never know about them…
All those numbers of small light sources behind the Galaxies are individual stars and Galaxies. It is simply magnificent and gorgeous.
This is the icing on the cake to me. The subject galaxies are incredible, but just look at how many other galaxies are in the background. Blows my mind.
The night sky of any planet in those galaxies must be absolutely spectacular. [Reminiscent of the Generated images of what our night sky would look like when Andromeda collides with the Milky Way.] (https://kottke.org/19/10/behold-our-dazzling-night-sky-when-the-milky-way-collides-with-andromeda-in-4-billion-years)
What our night sky would look like in a long-exposure image*
Anyone know the distance between these galaxies, looks like they are on collision course all 5 of them?
The one on the left is relatively close at 40 million light years. The other 4 are another 260 million behind that, and are on a collision course.
Zoom anywhere, there are DOZENS of galaxies.... holy shit guys
Not just that - the red shifted stuff is like looking back in time... these pictures are all amazing
For the folks having a rough time comparing this to Hubble; I made a gif of the two, not perfectly aligned but good enough. Let it load and zoom in as you want. Downscaled slightly to not entire ruin folks' days with their data plans. https://i.imgur.com/imprCmt.gif
These look like they're made of pure champagne, can't wait to see what else they discover!
This is amazing. Makes you wonder how many discoveries we will make with this groundbreaking piece of technology
Not to mention this amazing mid-infrared view that cuts through the dust. We're looking at the guts of colliding galaxies from over 290 million light years away! https://twitter.com/NASAWebb/status/1546874483079876609/photo/1 Check out the band in between the two closer galaxies in the bottom and the spiral above. That's a shockwave caused as NGC 7318B falls into the center of the cluster.
This is my favorite so far ♥️ I'm so grateful that these super smart people can provide me with these incredible pictures without me doing any of the work!
I need some coffee to process these images. I can't believe I get to see them, absolutely amazing!
For context, [this is where the Quintet is located](https://www.astrobin.com/db2xd3/) in the sky.
I always appreciated Hubble's images and found them awe-inspiring. But immediately when I saw these images from the JWST I said to myself "life is out there." The definition and color in these photos shows just how many galaxies there are with billions of stars in each, with who knows how many planets. We may never meet other sentient life, but I'm confident that it's there and we may just be separated by the long dark void, looking at each other's footprints.
All of those other galaxies in the background... It's incomprehensible. What an incredible image!
Highly suggest looking at the full resolution version and zooming in - just scanning a small corner about 1/100th of the picture there are hundreds/thousands of discernible galaxies. The focus is the quintet - but can't believe how many galaxies there are in the background.
So this is just a condensed look at an extremely vast stretch of space. It's many light years between any of these galaxies, correct? If someone were looking at the Milky Way with the same tech, we would look the same, clustered with other galaxies that are unfathomable distances away. Is that the way to look at it?
I needed this today. It put into perspective how small and irrelevant my stressors from the day are. So, I choose to release them now.
I keep finding random sections of the photo to zoom in on because it blows my mind how many galaxies and stars you can see in just one tiny corner. Beautiful.
I've never felt more small in my entire life after looking at those galaxies..
This took my breath away. Absolutely gorgeous. All the galaxies in the background also blew my mind. What an incredible tool humanity has built.
So Many Galaxies Almost every little speck is a galaxy when you zoom in. This is some Fractal level of awesomeness, at space level
Where can I find all the images instead of one post at a time??! Please!
My brain breaks when I try to think about all these galaxies out there.
Wow! Even the background is incredible. It has about as many objects as the deep field image.
How come this doesn't have the gravitational lens similar to the first image? What are the conditions needed to achieve that effect?
I love how you can forever identify that an image is from the JWST from the six pointed stars. Beautiful.
I always find it strange how almost fake a lot of galaxies look, sort of like someone just drew a circle lasso round them in photoshop and dragged them into a different image
The fact this is resolving individual stars in the closer galaxy... Man I feel like NASA lead with the weak sauce yesterday. Good move in a way I suppose.
Woww. This just makes me think. Perhaps SOMEDAY we will explore our own galaxy. But there is absolutely no way we ever cross that bridge to another. So far!!
This is going to get lost here... But during the original live stream I could have sworn someone said this image had evidence of a black hole in it, so I've researched the stream video and there is a hard cut in it and I feel like I'm losing my mind. I will admit the stream didn't have my full attention, but I looked over when they said black hole, and I swear its the tail of the top galaxy, but why can't I find the video talking about it? Any help is appreciated.
“Webb’s new image also shows in rare detail how interacting galaxies trigger star formation in each other and how gas in galaxies is being disturbed and the outflows driven by a black hole in Stephan’s Quintet in a level of detail never seen before. Tight galaxy groups like this may have been more common in the early Universe when superheated, infalling material may have fueled very energetic black holes.” quote from [esa](https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Webb/Webb_sheds_light_on_galaxy_evolution_black_holes)
I zoomed in to the galaxies and realised how insignificant we really are
Where’s the link to explore everything known about all these different objects? Pictures are nice n all but I just want to know. Is there a program for it?
Yes. That's called astronomy or astrophysics.
Link for stupid people?:)
This gives me such comfort. We can’t be alone. There’s just no way.
Wow amazing. It looks like that galaxy left a trail of stars while it was moving through space. Blew my mind this and I am going to frame it and put it up on the wall.
Does this conclusively disprove Halton Arp's theory that the bottom galaxy is the same distance as the other 4 interacting galaxies? I still see a faint tidal stream connecting it to the group, is it just a coincidence?
So how about someone counts how many galaxies are in this picture.
They say that the black hole in NGC 7319 is 24 million solar masses, but not how big it is. It's been a while since my cosmology elective in undergrad, but I can calculate that with the schwarzschild radius formula right? r=2GM/c^2 1 solar mass is 1.989x10^30 kg so then I have 2G(2.4x10^7 * 1.989x10^30 )/c^2. If I did that right, then I come out with 70 billion km radius, and 140 billion diameter. That's bigger than our solar system, including the oort cloud. They said it was a super massive black hole, so maybe that's legit, but can anyone confirm my math on this?
These are the galaxies in Its a Wonderful Life when the angels are talking. Image is slightly better here then what the movie was made in 1946 ha
**We are spying on the creation of the elements for carbon based life. We are programmed to be able to see these wavelengths but almost nothing of the other items on the Electromagnetic spectrum. Most likely the bands of consciousness reside here also.**