Mike! James Webb! Finally!

[Kyle]

Tomorrow’s launch day! Tommorrow!

[Kyle]

Tomorrow at 6:20 eastern. You can watch it on NASA’s livestream:

https://www.nasa.gov/nasalive

[Phoebe]

Whoa! Shouldn't they wait for sunrise? What about Santa?

[Eliahad]

Santa should be back home by then. 'sides, this is what Mike wanted for Christmas, anyway.

[Tahlvin]

It’s on its way!

[Kyle]

Oh no. I called it Hubble. It’s Webb.

And Mike didn’t even read to notice. Boo.

[Mike]

I noticed. It's why I didn't respond.

No... kidding! I did notice, but today has been a wonderfully busy Christmas day. Aidan even called me a 6 this morning to ask if I wanted to watch the launch together, but I had such a sinus headache, I couldn't bring myself to get out of bed quite that early.

[Tahlvin]

My oldest and I watched it.

[poorpete]

Dude have you seen these photos

https://www.nasa.gov/webbfirstimages

This tiny section of the first released image is blowing my mind

Screen Shot 2022-07-12 at 1.22.50 PM.png (171.8 KiB) Viewed 1008 times

Not only is the visual light bending before it reaches us, but looks like it's creating a second mirror image of a single galaxy.

[Mike]

YES! I saw this yesterday. That refracted galaxy is on the order of 13.5 billion light years away, and thus 13.5 billion years old.

Here's the full image:



Apparently, that picture represents an area of the sky equivalent to what you could cover with a grain of sand held at arm's length. The items in the shot with the six lens-flare-like artifacts around them are stars in the Milky Way. Everything else in the pic is galaxies.

Holy crap, this gets me excited

[All factual information from me is cribbed (possibly badly) from Hank Green.]

[Eliahad]

So, uh, is there life out there?

[poorpete]

Screen Shot 2022-07-14 at 12.31.15 PM.jpg (91.81 KiB) Viewed 986 times

So reading up more on gravitational lensing, it's possible all four of these are the same galaxy that's being pulled around the star in between them.

Here's another example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_Cross

[poorpete]

I think in the next few decades we'll be pretty optimistic that some life is out there.
Life that matches or surpasses humans I doubt we'll find anytime soon.
Saw humans have been on Earth for 0.0017% of its existence, so if an intelligent life spied on Earth, chances are it'd give up on their being something here before we show up.

There's a story idea in this, it's a little too dark for me, but maybe I'll flesh it out if I ever start writing books. We discover a bustling life not billions of light years away but say just a thousand, or hundred. We make a decision to go visit them, but since we see years in the past we can't really let them we're coming until we're almost there. Till we meet, it's really just watching a reality TV show. Then we see... not sure, either their civilization crumble, or they see us and begin a war footing. Maybe they see us coming and for 50 years get excited but then a new group takes power and for 50 years they are angry. I dunno. There's a lot to do with this, maybe it's been done?

[Mike]

I'm sure Jim (I know JWST well enough that it has asked me to just call it Jim) is gonna catch tons exoplanets passing in front of their own stars, and every time that happens, we know the composition of it's atmosphere. Either we'll start seeing some of them with distinct biosignatures and we'll conclude that life is the simplest explanation and life must be plentiful in the universe OR we won't find any conclusive biosignatures after 500 of these and we'll conclude that life is exceedingly rare.

Or most frustratingly, we'll find only one or two such planets and they'll be borderline cases where we have good reason to believe that it's NOT life, and then we'll just keep arguing.

[Phoebe]

Pictures soooooo good!

[Mike]

Yes! I need so much more.