PHOTOS FROM MORE THAN 13 BILLION YEARS AGO

Yesterday I indicated that NASA would be releasing the first full-color image released from the James Webb Space Telescope.  Well, here it is:

Our universe is around 13.7 billion years old.  The JWST, launched on December 25, 2021, will have the potential to look back perhaps 13.4 billion years.  It is six times larger and 100 times more powerful than Hubble, sent out 32 years ago in 1990.  Here is a graphic of the same portion of the sky comparing Hub with Jim:

Galaxy clusters, as seen above, are the most massive objects in the universe.  This boggles the mind, but a cluster of galaxies can consist of hundreds to thousands of galaxies bound together by gravity.  The typical mass of each is 10 to the fourteenth power - 10 to the fifteenth power the mass of our sun!  Then, there are  bodies such as the Laniakea SUPERcluster as seen to the right.  

Laniakea is Hawaiian for immense heaven.  Remember that asteroid that recently zoomed through our solar system?  Oumuamua was discovered by space scientists at the University of Hawaii using our Pan-STARRS1 telescope on Haleakala, Maui.  Whether it was a comet or asteroid is still being debated.  Oumuamua is Hawaiian for a messenger from afar arriving first.

What is shown in this first JWST photo was discovered by faculty of the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Hawaii.  The infrared technology used on the new space telescope was developed at the Mauna Kea site on the Big Island of Hawaii.  Sadly, Hawaii is beginning to abdicate international leadership, as the long-ago proposed Thirty Meter Telescope remains suspended by protests from local Hawaiian groups.

Four more photos will be released today.  Here are two of them:

What do they represent?  Read this article.

I've long been saying that light would take 100,000 years to pass through our galaxy from one end to the other.  Well, I just got corrected, the answer now is 200,000 years.  How come?  Turns out that our Milky Way is bigger than we thought.  Nothing to do with the James Webb Space Telescope, but light would take around that long to get across any one of the galaxies shown above.  Of course, there are larger ones, like IC 1101.  Light would take 6 million years to get across this giant frisbee.  Of course, each speck in those JWST photos represents either a galaxy or galaxy cluster, meaning light would take from 100,000 to maybe a billion light years to across...each speck.

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