In the sibling photo in the index is a comparison of Hubble vs Webb.
Hubble is very brown-y, and Webb is much more blue.
But these are false colors, and they capture different light. It has to be an artistic decision to make it blue, vs brown, so does anyone here know the rationale? Is it to distinguish the different provenance? Is the color shift indicative of the captured spectrum difference? Is it a convention of the sensor? Is it a 2020s fad?
mid near infrared vs visible light. one of the big bets with webb is that visible isn't the ideal spectrum to target. it's fantastic from a research standpoint but the pictures may seem less pleasing vs hubbles.
It is interesting seeing past the central portion to see the complete rings on the back side. In the MIRI image, it looks like a special FX shot from some scifi where the explosion happens on a plane rather than a sphere.
i got nerd sniped and did the same thing myself. i could not find a way to blend the two images together that did anything interesting that the separate images did not do on their own. looks like they came to the same conclusion.
I thought the same about an old-vs-new comparison of the classic Pillars of Creation image, though on a second look they are both stunning in their own ways.
"Unlike the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies, the Triangulum Galaxy does not appear to have a supermassive black hole at its center. This may be because the mass of a galaxy's central supermassive black hole correlates with the size of the galaxy's central bulge, and unlike the Milky Way and Andromeda, the Triangulum Galaxy is a pure disk galaxy with no bulge."
Triangulum is a spiral galaxy in our local group, perhaps bound to Andromeda or us.
I’m gonna be the grumpy old man here, but this is a marketing page. If there’s science going on here, it’s not even mentioned. Instead it’s all artist’s visualisations of infra-red data of an unusual galaxy. Is the galaxy of any scientific interest? I have no idea from the article whatsoever.
It's a pop sci article. It shows off advances in our imaging capabilities and hopefully inspires a little wonder about the universe. I believe the intended takeaway is something like "neat! We can see a lot of stuff going on in infrared that's hard to see in the visible spectrum". The rendering of other wavelengths as red, blue, and green pixels is a very standard scientific visualization method for multispectral imaging, and the article makes it clear what choices they make to do so.
You're thinking of a nebula. That’s the remnants of a supernova. A galaxy is an unimaginably large collection of stars. A nebula is still quite large, but several orders of magnitude smaller than a galaxy.
In the sibling photo in the index is a comparison of Hubble vs Webb.
Hubble is very brown-y, and Webb is much more blue.
But these are false colors, and they capture different light. It has to be an artistic decision to make it blue, vs brown, so does anyone here know the rationale? Is it to distinguish the different provenance? Is the color shift indicative of the captured spectrum difference? Is it a convention of the sensor? Is it a 2020s fad?
Webb uses mid-infrared to capture the image. I'm not sure if they then assign colors arbitrarily.
Hubble uses visible light and I prefer this image from an artistic standpoint as it seems to capture depth better.
https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2024/137/01J...
mid near infrared vs visible light. one of the big bets with webb is that visible isn't the ideal spectrum to target. it's fantastic from a research standpoint but the pictures may seem less pleasing vs hubbles.
Probably personal taste, but I still like Hubble's image more, really gives the disk some depth, as opposed to the flatter MIRI image.
Quick link to Hubble image:
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/science/explore-the-...
It is interesting seeing past the central portion to see the complete rings on the back side. In the MIRI image, it looks like a special FX shot from some scifi where the explosion happens on a plane rather than a sphere.
There's also https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/videos/2024/137/01J... which shows Spitzer, Webb, Hubble with rotating images at the same image size.
i got nerd sniped and did the same thing myself. i could not find a way to blend the two images together that did anything interesting that the separate images did not do on their own. looks like they came to the same conclusion.
I thought the same about an old-vs-new comparison of the classic Pillars of Creation image, though on a second look they are both stunning in their own ways.
https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/052/01G...
I looked up Triangulum on a lark, and learned:
"Unlike the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies, the Triangulum Galaxy does not appear to have a supermassive black hole at its center. This may be because the mass of a galaxy's central supermassive black hole correlates with the size of the galaxy's central bulge, and unlike the Milky Way and Andromeda, the Triangulum Galaxy is a pure disk galaxy with no bulge."
Triangulum is a spiral galaxy in our local group, perhaps bound to Andromeda or us.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangulum_Galaxy
Might it be that in galaxies without a blackhole at the center, civilizations could be much older in that galaxy compared to galaxies like ours?
What was the impetus of you looking up Triangulum?
I was curious how much closer it was than the Sombrero (about 10x).
I thought I missed something in TFA. It's interesting to see how a post can make different readers spin off into various random trains of thought.
A fun game would be to make a post like yours and then find the fewest degrees of Kevin Bacon to get back to TFA.
Tip: Click on an image and scroll down for options of higher resolutions.
Just Wonderful. Though it looks a bit less like a sombrero this time. Might need to think about changing the name.
I’m gonna be the grumpy old man here, but this is a marketing page. If there’s science going on here, it’s not even mentioned. Instead it’s all artist’s visualisations of infra-red data of an unusual galaxy. Is the galaxy of any scientific interest? I have no idea from the article whatsoever.
It's a pop sci article. It shows off advances in our imaging capabilities and hopefully inspires a little wonder about the universe. I believe the intended takeaway is something like "neat! We can see a lot of stuff going on in infrared that's hard to see in the visible spectrum". The rendering of other wavelengths as red, blue, and green pixels is a very standard scientific visualization method for multispectral imaging, and the article makes it clear what choices they make to do so.
I see what you did there :-)
Spelled out for those who don't: 'sombrero' is Spanish for hat.
All galaxies are just space explosions
You're thinking of a nebula. That’s the remnants of a supernova. A galaxy is an unimaginably large collection of stars. A nebula is still quite large, but several orders of magnitude smaller than a galaxy.
instead of being "explosions", galaxies appear to be closer to a condensate between bubbles of ... well .. much less.
No, they are not.