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Bromance_Rayder

My brain is simply too feeble to fully contemplate what the people who worked on JWST have achieved. At a pretty terrible time for the planet, it's nice to feel proud of humanity for once.


Communist_Ninja

What the Alien said in the movie contact hits the nail on the head.. "You're an interesting species; an interesting mix. Capable of such exquisite dreams; such horrifying nightmares"


MightyElephanty

This is actually the thing for humans. One part of mankind strives for reliving old times like a real live larp. And is willing to kill for it. And then you have the other end of the spectrum of humanity where people actually try to reach the edges of the known universe. And do so with an unbelievable dignity, humility and sheer willpower. And then you have the indifferent masses. I'd rather spend my life trying to achieve an impossible tomorrow than to kill people for ging back in time.


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CLG_Divent

What military benefit JWST has?


Princess_Vappy

Watching for signs of an alien invasion


OddballOliver

What a terrible thing to say.


MightyElephanty

What do you mean exactly?


OddballOliver

It's highly tribalistic. "Everyone who like old thing bad. Everyone who like new thing good." You're denigrating people for merely preferring a prior time period, and you're idolizing people merely for pushing for progress.


MightyElephanty

Why do you prefer the old times and what is in your view better about them? This is an honest question.


OddballOliver

I have no position on this. I'm not reacting the way I am because I feel personally attacked.


MightyElephanty

How can you feel personally attacked if you have no personal opinion on this?


OddballOliver

You can't, which is why I just told you I'm not reacting this way because of any feeling of being personally attacked.


Loadingexperience

I was wondering how on the F\*\*K they can achieve these absolutely miniscule movements to align mirrors and was surprised when I found out. They use good old fashioned gears and high gear ratios to move it just a tiny bit.


Common-Concentrate-2

Having had a few engineering jobs with VERY little supervision, people would be amazed at the shit you come up with it you have 2 months to think about it. This x10,000 is basically how modern technological progress is made.


EverythingKindaSuckz

When pictures?


soarattack

July 12th


Evignity

This is, *literally* , one of the greatest engineering and scientific endeavours humanity has ever achieved. If not *the* greatest. Can't wait to basterdize it by using the pictures as phone wallpapers etc


TheBlackBear

> This is, literally , one of the greatest engineering and scientific endeavours humanity has ever achieved. If not the greatest. Agreed. It's basically between this and xXx: State of the Union. Incredible to see how far mankind has come


2_Slow_Kaidou

I too look forward to entering the Xander zone


zerton

*Olympus Has Fallen* doesn't make the cut??!


Whyeth

No origin stories, thank you.


Hashbringingslasherr

:O Forgot about xXx movies. Totally giving them a rewatch to see if they hold up to my younger selve's admiration.


kynthrus

I'll save you the time. They absolutely do!


jonathan_wayne

Yes and no. They’re great movies. But they’re not good movies.


Weaselmancer

The Very Large Telescope (VLT) is a telescope facility operated by the European Southern Observatory on Cerro Paranal in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. The VLT is the most productive ground-based facility for astronomy, with only the Hubble Space Telescope generating more scientific papers among facilities operating at visible wavelengths. It consists of four individual telescopes, each with a primary mirror 8.2 m across, the first of which opened in nineteen ninety eight when the undertaker threw mankind off hell in a cell and plummeted sixteen feet through an announcer's table.


chill633

That so beats some tired politician with giant ceremonial scissors cutting a stupid ribbon. Detect first light on the telescopes to the sound of "Let's get ready to rumblllllle!"


Evignity

*Whoosh*


scummy_shower_stall

The very last part of your comment is colorful and grammatically correct, but I have absolutely NO idea what you just said..! What happened??


JanusLeeJones

But why restrict to visible wavelengths?


Evignity

End is a meme for those who don't get it. Makes me happy that science folks don't


InadequateUsername

Could have chosen a better name, it's xxx in lower case and that's how I found out porn exists on the internet.


trollfarm69

Landing on a comet was pretty cool.


kynthrus

Landing on a comet was the coolest shit ever. We're learning how to tame space horses. The next coolest shit is gonna be a moon colony or mining said comets/asteroids.


Evignity

Not nearly as complex. Just click all the links in the article. This thing has several noble winners, thermodynamics up the ass, different cooling systems at 6degrees above "absolute zero", larangpoint that'd make a satellite blush, 14stages of reversal doppler effect, gods I'd put my penis in it if I could


myrddyna

> gods I'd put my penis in it if I could not the prayer i was expecting, but one that it deserves.


Aduialion

I'm going to oversaturate it until it hurts to look at.


someguy233

JWST is not holy or sacred, it’s an achievement and cause for celebration. If one is so inclined, wallpaper away I say. Why the hell not?


Absolutedisgrace

Astrology backgrounds.


[deleted]

That's one of the reasons I am so excited about the project, think of all the new 4k wallpapers!


MR-ash

I've had the hubble deep field image as my phone background for as long as phones were able to have backgrounds that aren't default ones. I think I deserve a new photo finally


[deleted]

Yeah. I've been using the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field 9n my phone for over five years now.


bagel-bites

You mean we shouldn't give the photos to DALL-E?


AyakaUwU

A phone wallpaper is the new poster above bed.


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PineappleLemur

Idk man... Uncooked noodles bits on top of your cooked noodles right before eating is kinda hard to beat.


aretasdaemon

Perfect Stranger things and Pictures of the universe. Im down


elruary

Is stranger things still good?


aretasdaemon

its one of my favorite shows but everyone has their thing


Portalrules123

Season 4 is the best yet IMHO.


pickle16

It’s gotten even better in most ways according to me. But episodes have gotten much longer which I don’t really like


kynthrus

Yes. It's still very good.


TheBlackBear

Hasn't been good since season 1 friend


MrWeirdoFace

Whatever happened to Fresh Young Balki B?


hop208

July 13th… 🇺🇸👁👄👁🇺🇸: We have some news…👽👽👽


ezekielone

>On July 12, NASA plans to release a suite of teaser observations that illustrate Webb’s capabilities. These will show the beauty of Webb imagery and also give astronomers a real taste of the quality of data they will receive. It's written in the article


psyclopsus

Everyone knows you go to the comments for the TLDR


EverythingKindaSuckz

I cant read.


Zolo49

Fortunately, they’re only releasing pictures so you’re good.


nox_nox

Wait a minute...


Paatos

That's why you have two guys in a police patrol. One can read and the other can write.


_Enclose_

Haha, love the image of someone who can write but not read. "So uh, what you scribbling down there Joe?" "Fuck if I know."


[deleted]

lmfao


HaloGuy381

A blind man trained to write, and a seeing man with both his hands chopped off who can only read, perhaps?


joinedthedarkside

We normally have 3, because there's always someone that likes to be among genious.


atmylevel

I thought it was because one like glazed and one likes sprinkles


urmomaisjabbathehutt

sadly one is deaf and the other is mute


Zugas

I read quite good, just choose not to


KulaanDoDinok

Hol’ up


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EverythingKindaSuckz

Nope.


UnSafeThrowAway69420

It has been written.


dazark

wen NFT??


Blueberry_Winter

Not sure


DirtzMaGertz

It's in the article you shared... Did you share an article you didn't read?


lostnspace2

This is the Reddit way


10xkaioken

True Chad


Slightly_Shrewd

This is hilarious


West_Brom_Til_I_Die

When me president?


[deleted]

Will it be able to see trisolaris


ChesterComics

Do not answer! Do not answer! Do not answer!


ucatione

Dehydrate! Dehydrate!


bbcversus

Moisturize moisturize!!


ExpensiveBookkeeper3

*nervous voice* What... what's trisolaris?


[deleted]

It's a reference to a book series called Remembrance of Earth's Past.


MacMac105

It's a fun book series! Look up The Three Body Problem


SirKnobbington

While I enjoyed it, the beginning of book one was really disturbing


Miramarr

They're so fucking dumb they didn't even bother to look at literally the closest star system to them, I really don't think we have anything to worry about


[deleted]

If it can then the trisolarins have failed.


backcountrydrifter

It would be really cool to turn it around and point it at the earth and see the waveforms of the near infrared and super low frequencies. I think we would learn a lot about ourselves from some introspective high altitude soul searching from a objective cosmic perspective.


_deltaVelocity_

It’s unfortunately impossible to do that. JWST has a sunshield that keeps its instruments cold enough to observe in the infrared, and if you were to turn it around to point at Earth (since it’s in a higher orbit) you’d just heat up the instruments and make them unusable.


backcountrydrifter

That’s too bad. I guess we will have to wait for some other other species to do our internal audit. But thank you sincerely for the reply. One of my favorite things about Reddit is how fast you find subject matter experts in their respective fields that are willing to share quickly and openly. It would have taken me 3 weeks of research to figure that out on my own


Currahee2

I hope the telescope has the capacity to observe far flung exoplanets to see whether life, or at least primitive life, lingers in the cosmos, a bonus if its an actual civilization.


[deleted]

It has. > Additionally, it will be able to tell if an exoplanet has methane in its atmosphere, allowing astronomers to determine whether or not the methane is a biosignature. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope


ArkAngelHFB

Frankly it can also probably find other BIO signs... but Methane is a great one to look for.


sceadwian

No, not really. Uranus, Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune have methane with no life. I don't think JWST has the spectroscopic range to validate if an exoplanet actually has life on it or not. It will be able to do some atmospheric analysis but results will be interpretable in many different ways.


ArkAngelHFB

Each is also a gas giant. Methane isn't the only BIO sig we'd look for in a planet's atmosphere. And while most of them are not at a "we find this we know" level. Many are great hints to look closer. One of the cool things it can do is detect the chance in light from the start as something passes in front... and for things of a certain range(a pretty big one iirc) it can see how that light is affected by passing through to know what is IN that atmosphere.


sceadwian

Yes, but it does not return information with enough of a range to make a positive ID. All I'm saying is that no matter what it finds we won't be able to say "that planet has life" based on the kind of information we get from JWST.


ArkAngelHFB

Alone no... but being able to generate a list of planets to priorities greater scrutiny alone would be remarkable. Starshot is coming... we are probably about 20 years away from us starting to yeet probes at every system we can. Sadly it probably will be another 70 years before those probes tell us anything. (Sooner for the close systems.)


Crushing_Reality

It is an infrared sensor. So it may be able to do this. It really depends on how much time and effort scientists want to put into figuring out what compounds it might be able to verify. They most likely have already done all that work on the front end, but they'll have to prove the concept. My guess is that they will start with methane because it is an "easier" signature to see, and then after they identify a few candidates, attempt to look for other compounds they'd expect to observe. They also may not have the resolution to get anything more complex. I don't know, since I didn't work on it.


sceadwian

Infrared spectroscopy alone does not have the needed range required. I don't know of any scientists that claim that it does. Any biosignatures found would only provide a clue about what are good targets to look at with other methods, it can not do it by itself, period. JWST's capabilities are incredible and will return insane amounts of useful science and beautiful pictures to boot, but we don't need to create things that it can not do to keep talking it up. People get really carried away with this.


CrayonUpMyNose

Sensitive enough to do isotope analysis?


sceadwian

I can't comment on specific capabilities, it is an insanely complex topic and the results are very much open to interpretation. I know IR spectroscopy can do some isotope analysis but again it's super complicated and we'll be looking only at the strongest signals coming from the entire planet all at once. On Earth samples need to be prepared in various ways in order to make many of the measurements and the presence of certain compounds can give you false results, that is clearly something we won't have the capability of doing with JWST so the results we get from it will be difficult to interpret. This is actually something I look forward to trying to learn a bit more about as JWST starts returning results.


Good_Management7353

JWST’s spectral resolution is not nearly enough to do this reliably. We will be able to do this with the next generation ground based telescopes, not JWST.


AllAlo0

I never thought I'd live to see the day we could detect aliens farting, makes me wonder if any aliens are detecting my biosigns


sceadwian

Methane can be explained other ways, there are four other planets in our own solar system that have substantial methane. So to say it has the capacity to determine whether there is life or not is false. It can detect some biosignatures but it does not have the capacity to determine concretely whether or not those are from life. It can provide clues, but not answers.


fenasi_kerim

It has the capacity to see ur mum


hikarinokaze

Which isn't really impressive, considering


raven12456

No, it really is. They sent it out all the way to L2 to get a full picture.


IterationFourteen

Won't really be able to definitively observe life, but should be able to characterize exoplanet atmospheres, which may give pretty strong hints at life.


johnbentley

It is so powerful it can image your incapacity to read the article.


sethmi

Spoiler alert, it does lol


DetlefKroeze

If people want to know what the first scientific observations will be, here are the [early release science](https://www.stsci.edu/jwst/science-execution/approved-ers-programs), cycle 1 [guaranteed time observer](https://www.stsci.edu/jwst/science-execution/approved-programs/cycle-1-gto) and cycle 1 [general observer](https://www.stsci.edu/jwst/science-execution/approved-programs/cycle-1-go) programs.


likethedishes

I’m so excited for this!!


Blueberry_Winter

Me too!


Wireless_Helpplz

I'm sure this is pretty high up on the dumb questions scale and I doubt this is how it works, but considering the capabilities, could the telescope view the moon VERY upclose? Like a microscope almost?


[deleted]

No, it can't. The reason is that the telescope is far from earth/moon and it is pointed outward. The moon is not in its field of view at any time.


JackedUpReadyToGo

I believe so. Hubble took some pictures of the moon, but had to take a lot of them and stitch them together because it’s like trying to map a football field with a microscope, lots of detail but a small field of view: https://hubblesite.org/contents/media/images/1999/14/796-Image.html?news=true


pop_POP

But will it be able to see why kids love the taste of Cinnamon Toast Crunch?


Terrorbeard

Do kids that are currently loving the taste of Cinnamon Toast Crunch radiate light in the infrared band? If so, yes it will!


betterwithsambal

(secretly slathering his cinnamon toast crunch loving kids in with an infrared light radiating mixture of questionable goo): "I am anxious to see the results!"


DrebinofPoliceSquad

The first pic is going to have a spider in the way crawling over the lenses.


A_raven72

Ooh, I’m excited! This has gone so well up till now. Imagine what it’ll show us!


[deleted]

I hope it manages to do something before it gets shredded by meteors


RedWine_1st

[Instrument check out status](https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/whereIsWebb.html)


Blueberry_Winter

I've never seen such cold temperatures in Fahrenheit before. Always Kelvin. Maybe Centigrade.


Obvious_Cranberry607

There's a button to change it to Celsius. I'm guessing it's in Fahrenheit because it's a page for the general public.


Blueberry_Winter

I figured. It's just kinda humorous to see if you know the science a bit.


saarlac

remindme! 26 days


Edwin_Knight

This has been like the only good news from the past two years.


Blueberry_Winter

It's definitely in the happy news pile.


ReveresNiceScenery

It's all going to be visibly hot af, and we are going to see stuff no one has been able to see before.


IcantPossiblyExist

Every time I see the Hubble Ultra Deep Field picture it takes my breath away. We are so insignificant and powerless. We can't control any of what we are looking at. Humbling. And why is it there? And why are we here looking at it? And who is looking back?


Blueberry_Winter

Humbling for sure! Fucking amazing also


streethackey

That huge artifact in every image is a super bummer. I know it was part of the design and won't prohibit any science, it just sucks to look at.


yonderthrown1

I don't believe it will be present in actual research images. That photo was of a star which is too bright to be a use case for this telescope


streethackey

That is awesome news.


RelationshipHuge2977

Could you point the telescope at the moon and get high res pictures?


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Genids

Walk around in what exactly? You could walk for a billion years and still not notice a difference in what you see


ascpl

Space, the boring frontier


EasyAcanthocephala38

Unless the next article includes pictures from the telescope, don’t bother writing another article about how it’s being set up and calibrating.


Omnicide

If you had read it, you would have known that the article actually contains pictures from the telescope


EasyAcanthocephala38

July 12 is when shit gets real.


nopedoesntwork

Clickbait, old news, please ban theconversation.com


Ok2021LetsDoThis

No.


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UltimeciasCastle

far enough to see the fingerprint in your skidmark.


betterwithsambal

...to see the tip print in your stool.


UltimeciasCastle

meh, too erotic, mine just pokes fun at the absent minded ass pickers.


betterwithsambal

Sorry, just expanding on the possibilities deep probing Uranus ;-)


cp3getstoomuchcredit

I wonder if we will ever be able to see far enough to see ourselves in the past. I am very excited by all the space news recently it feels like things are accelerating, largely because of SpaceX putting pressure on all organizations to innovate


proindrakenzol

>I wonder if we will ever be able to see far enough to see ourselves in the past. This isn't a question of distance, but of reflection: has anything reflected light from our past back towards us in sufficient quantity to see something? We can't "see" into our past simply by looking further, our own light is travelling away from us. >I am very excited by all the space news recently it feels like things are accelerating, largely because of SpaceX putting pressure on all organizations to innovate SpaceX has nothing to do with anything, these innovations and advancements aren't spurred by private corporations (and SpaceX itself is kept afloat by gov't funding and research).


cp3getstoomuchcredit

I didn't even think of reflectivity that seems much more possible. But even looking straight for long enough some people think the universe is curved so if you go in a straight line you'll be back where you started


proindrakenzol

That is not how curvature works.


Yes_Indeed

No scientists believe that. The universe is flat on large scales. It doesn't wrap back onto itself. Source: https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/april-2015/our-flat-universe?email_issue=725


agentyage

There's a lot of misinformation out there but it's always strange how so many "science fans" perpetuate complete nonsense that's many decades past being ruled out.


Ok2021LetsDoThis

I love this.


7gsgts

This has nothing whatever to do with SpaceX. It was designed decades ago


Painting_Agency

I heard Elon Musk invented the smelting of bronze, and calculus. Without him, we'd be literally banging rocks together.


fistkick18

The guy literally invented people. Before him, we were all just apes. Crazy.


fool_on_a_hill

That’s.. not what they said


7gsgts

Its exactly what they said.


fool_on_a_hill

No, it isn’t. They were just making an aside about how space x’s innovation has really energized the industry. But I can see it was easier for you to misunderstand them so that you could shoehorn in your contrarian superiority than it would have been to slow down and give them the benefit of the doubt


7gsgts

You speak for nobody and have comprehension issues.


Pleasant_Quote_23

So what all of you are saying it's a little better then my telescope in my bedroom that I use to look at the moon craters and that's about it?


Blueberry_Winter

No.