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#jwst

13 posts11 participants1 post today
Continued thread
Public
Mark McCaughrean

That's 0 for 5 now, as three more GO proposals as co-I bite the dust.

Confirming again just how damn hard it is to get #JWST observing time.

Of course, it's good that the telescope we worked to build for more than a quarter of a century is so powerful & in high demand.

But I don't think it's something that should be crowed about either, as we all know that anything in the top third, say, is an excellent proposal.

After that, it becomes random at best, biased in other ways at worst.

Continued thread
Public
Mark McCaughrean

And indeed the actual #JWST telescope general observer (GO) proposal results are coming out now in addition to the archival research (AR) ones.

Current status as co-I: 0 for 2, one AR proposal, one GO.

The latter was ranked in the first quintile of all proposals submitted & still didn't get time. But then the oversubscription rate was 9:1 😬

Public
Mark McCaughrean

And so it begins – the results of the heavily over-subscribed #JWST Cycle 4 proposal round are arriving.

Or at least the ones for Archival Research programmes are; I haven't seen any actual observing programme ones yet.

Either way, when all the results start flowing, expect a few excited people & many disappointed ones in your timeline 😬✌️

Public
Arp Bot 🤖

JWST NIRCam and MIRI image of Arp 142, also known as NGC 2936, NGC 2937, and UGC 5130, or the Penguin and the Egg.

The Penguin is a spiral galaxy whose shape has been distorted by the gravity of the elliptical Egg galaxy. The two are about 100,000 light-years apart and completed a close pass between 25 and 75 million years ago.

Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
Source: webbtelescope.org/contents/med

Arp 142, two interacting galaxies, observed in near- and mid-infrared light. At left is NGC 2937, nicknamed the Egg. Its center is brighter and whiter. There are six diffraction spikes atop its gauzy blue layers. At right is NGC 2936, nicknamed the Penguin. Its beak-like region points toward and above the Egg. Where the eye would be is a small, opaque yellow spiral. The Penguin’s distorted arms and orange dust lanes from the bird’s beak, back, and tail. The tail is wide and layered, like a beta fish’s tail. A semi-transparent blue hue traces the Penguin and extends from the galaxy, creating an upside-down U over top of both galaxies. At top right is another galaxy seen from the side, pointing roughly at a 45-degree angle. It is largely light blue. Its length appears approximately as long as the Egg’s height. One foreground star with large, bright blue diffraction spikes appears over top of the galaxy and another near it. The entire black background is filled with tiny, extremely distant galaxies.
#ArpGalaxy#Galaxy#Space
Public
Dr. John Barentine FRAS

Hot new #JWST image just dropped. (Literally hot; the temperature inside this object can reach upward of 25,000 degrees.)

Meet the planetary #nebula NGC 1514, aka the "Crystal Ball Nebula". It's about 1500 light years away from Earth in the direction of the constellation Taurus.

Planetary nebulae occur toward the end of the lives of #stars that have about the mass of the Sun. They shed their outer layers into space, leaving behind an Earth-sized star called a white dwarf. Its temperature can be up to about 100,000 degrees, so it emits a lot of ultraviolet and X-ray light. That light energizes the gas ejected during the earlier phase, lighting it up like a neon sign. (NGC 1514's white dwarf is the bright star at the center with the spikes, which are an artifact of the telescope's optics.)

This image is a composite of individual frames made through three colored filters by the Webb telescope's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). The image shows two concentric shells of material whose bright edges appear as circles. It's actually an hourglass-shaped structure seen an angle inclined to our line of sight toward NGC 1514.

A newly published study finds that these rings are different than the reddish material inside them. The light they emit comes from very tiny grains of carbon-rich material given off by the progenitor star very late in its life.

But why the ring shapes? It turns out that the progenitor star was actually two, only one of which endured this phase of high mass loss. Energetic "winds" given off by the stellar pair shaped the carbon grains as they were pushed away from the system.

(Processing of this image was done by Judy Schmidt: flickr.com/photos/geckzilla/54)

A colorful planetary nebula appears on a dark background. The nebula is a range of colors from red to pink to orange to white and consists of an inner reddish region surrounded by two diffuse gray/white rings tilted at 45 degrees toward the lower right. A bright star appears in the center with six short diffraction spikes. Faint stars and galaxies are scattered across the background.
#Astronomy
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