Webb

[JimHow]

I want exoplanets!

[Jay Winton]

10:30 Eastern time. Will we see the Klingon cruiser?

[JimHow]

No exoplanet pictures, as far as I can tell.
Not seeing anything that makes me gasp. Big letdown?

[DavidG]

There was an exoplanet, with analysis of its atmosphere.
Deep field back 13 billion years showing gravitational lending.
Incredible detail of Carina nebula, Southern ring, Stephan’s Quintet in multiple wavelengths.

I’d say quite stunning.

[JimHow]

Can I see it, or are these just some numbers in a computer.
I mean, we’ve seen mathematical “discoveries” of exoplanets for years.
I want to “see” one. I want to “see” these water vapor clouds of which they speak.

[JimHow]

Twenty years ago, Dan Goldin said that, in our lifetimes, we would see the surfaces of exoplanets. Nobody believed that could be true, but it captured my imagination. And then Webb came along. The future is now. Show me the surface of an exoplanet.

[Racer Chris]

That's not what it's for Jim.
You'll have to wait for the next generation of space telescope.

[Racer Chris]

There was an exoplanet, with analysis of its atmosphere.
Deep field back 13 billion years showing gravitational lending.
Incredible detail of Carina nebula, Southern ring, Stephan’s Quintet in multiple wavelengths.

I’d say quite stunning.

It makes me feel even smaller than I already did.

[JimHow]

Came upon this great Neil deGrasse video from the gal who is in charge of exoplanets!
She explains everything you need to know.
We know of 5,000 exoplanets. That figure is about to get much, much bigger....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avAMY6Kt6Nc

[JimHow]

It's about at the 12 minute mark of the video, after she says "we do not see these planets directly," that we get explanations about the atmospheres of these places billions of miles away from us. It's all about the "chemical fingerprint" of the atmospheres of the exoplanets eclipsing the suns they are orbiting billions of miles away.
The incredible glory of all of this is that exoplanet discovery was not even part of the mission when Webb was conceived in the 1990s, but because of the decades of delays in the project, it has become a major part of the project.
Is there another Medoc out there in the trillions of planets, surrounding the billions of stars, of Andromeda alone?
I say yes, many, many times over, in a single galaxy... Let alone among the trillions of galaxies in our universe, each will their untold billions of stars and planets....

How many 1855 classifications exist out there? At least millions, I'm extrapolating. That's why I'm always careful to say that the Medoc is the most propitious pinpoint in our solar system.... I'm pretty confident Leoville Poyferre would be difficult to ripen on Mars, or Titan, or anyplace else in our celestial neighborhood. But elsewhere in the beyond? I'm waiting for the first 100-year-old vine images from the Napa-like vineyards of Proxima Centauri. I have zero doubt, statistically, that they exist out there, many times over.

[Nicklasss]

How many Michel Rolland, making wines on these exoplanets?

Is micro-oxygenation is giving better results somewhere else?

Is there a blackhole called "stefan" that will taste and drink Chateau La Lagune until the end of time and temperature?

Does a Earth Roumier Musigny worth 1 billion cosmic credits on a planet near the border of galaxy Andromeda?

[DavidG]

Pretty good Washington Post article explaining some of the details in a few of the images here (may require a subscription): https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/ ... template_1

[DavidG]

Some more interesting explanations, on the geeky side, of how they get the color in the images when the actual data is all infrared (due to Doppler shift from receding galaxies/stars):

Instructions on how to download all the raw JWST data and process images yourself. How the various mono images were combined and colored to come up with a similar (maybe even slightly better) result.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVuonz2 ... bulaPhotos

Q&A between NASA and the lead image processor.
https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/gravity- ... ble-images


And an explanation as to why the images are in colors we normally see, and differences in MIRI (mid-IR) and NIRcam (near-IR) images. This from one of the guys in our local astronomy club who worked on the Webb:

In a nutshell it's the same process used by Hubble and every astroimager who creates a color image (or, every cell phone camera in existence). Observations are taken in two, three, or more filters, and the various data sets are assigned to either the R, G, or B channel and combined to make a color image, then the image is stretched to make it highlight the structure(s) desired by the imager. There's no real "conversion" involved -- the image data even at the longest wavelengths are just numbers representing the number of photons detected at that position on the sky. Usually the bluest wavelength data are assigned to the B channel and the reddest wavelength data to the R channel, but there is nothing forcing that choice; assigning the data differently results in what is nominally called "false-color" images and is commonly used in various automatic "filters" available to process cell phone images.

Now, maybe to the point of the question: while they are color images expressed as visible light colors, the structures you're seeing are often different from what you associate by viewing visible light images such as from Hubble. This is especially true in the mid-infrared images where you're seeing the actual glow from the dust at temperatures well below that of stellar photospheres -- dust will appear bright instead of dark. The typical interstellar dust cloud has a temperature near 15K, which is why MIRI had to be cooled to 6.4K to see the glow. In the near-infrared images, the dust is better penetrated than in visible light, so it looks thinner and you can see into the dust clouds better. Things like stars and nearby galaxies look pretty much the same in the near-IR and visible since you're still seeing the light emitted from stellar photospheres.

Now, the complication is that for cosmologically-distant galaxies, the visible light emitted by the galaxy has been redshifted to the near-IR so you actually *are* seeing the visible light. In fact, for the most distant galaxies, JWST sees the light emitted in the UV-portion of the spectrum, which is typically much lower in luminosity than the visible portion, so you will observe the visible light in the mid-IR filters on MIRI. All of this is redshift/distance dependent, so you have to look at each object in the same image differently and account for what you're seeing.

[JimHow]

Now that’s what I’m talking about!

https://apple.news/A4RZ6tBqVSB-I12tVQGh87w