The star:

The model:


WR 140.

James Webb Space Telescope captures dazzling 'galaxy merger' 270 million light-years away

Just in time for Halloween:

The high-resolution image is quite something:

Pillars of Creation (MIRI Image)

Seems that James Webb telescope is in heavy use, new interesting images:

Scientists are looking at light from the universe’s first and oldest star clusters in a new deep field image sent by the James Webb Space Telescope.

Deep field images are captured when powerful telescopes like Webb and the Hubble Space Telescope point their lenses toward dark spots in space between visible stars and leave the lenses open long enough to capture images.

These latest images show galaxies from the farthest parts of the universe including one 9 billion light-years away, reports say. Each one of them holds millions of stars.

Mighty intersting ... the light from these stars, I simply can't believe, are from billions and billions of light years away!

the light from these stars, I simply can't believe, are from billions and billions of light years away! — Agent Smith

:sparkle: Beautiful how they show their brightness to us. Isn't it? :sparkle:

Beautiful how they show their brightness to us. Isn't it? :sparkle: — javi2541997

Yep! The birghtness, it's compelling, for some reason.

In other news, A surprisingly near black hole about 10 times more massive than our Sun has been found just 1,560 light-years from Earth, which is about as far as the Orion Nebula. Gaia BH1, is part of a binary star system whose other member is a Sun-sized star about as far from its companion black hole as Mars is from the Sun.

The Carl Sagan Observatory 2034?

https://youtu.be/BIgQpXObjFI

NASA’s Webb Reveals an Exoplanet Atmosphere as Never Seen Before

What's been going on with JWST recently?

Classified.

What's been going on with JWST recently? — Changeling

James Webb Telescope question costs Google $100 billion

Google's hyped artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, Bard, just attributed one discovery to Webb that was completely false. In a livestreamed event, blog post(opens in new tab) and tweet(opens in new tab) showing the test AI in a demo Tuesday, the chatbot was asked, "What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my nine-year-old about?"

The query came back with two correct responses about "green pea" galaxies and 13-billion-year-old galaxies, but it also included one whopping error: that Webb took the very first pictures of exoplanets, or planets outside the solar system. The timing of that mistake was off by about two decades. ...

The embarrassing error for Google caused the search giant's parent company, Alphabet Inc., to lose $100 billion in market value Wednesday, according to Reuters

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A COSMIC RAY struck the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and frazzled one of its instruments, according to NASA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).

...The Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS), experienced a puzzling anomaly on January 15, when it suffered a communications delay within the instrument. This then caused NIRISS’ flight software to time out. After a thorough review, a reboot, and a test observation, teams from both space agencies are breathing a sigh of relief. — JWST Instrument Shut Down by Radiation

Cleaning pays:

JWST is better than anyone expected — here’s why
^{— Ethan Siegel · Big Think · Jan 23, 2023}

It's Hard to be Green

A green pea galaxy imaged by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey is shown alongside an infrared picture of an early pea [04590] captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. [...] Compensating for the cluster’s gravitational lensing effect and the galaxy’s greater distance to us, 04590 is even more compact, comparable to the smallest nearby green peas. — NASA

Green pea galaxies are small green and round.

But can our Milky Way be green?

In other news, newly discovered asteroid 2023DW is on a collision course with Earth due to arrive on Feb 14, 2046.
It is about 50 meters across, roughly similar to the Tunguska (1908) and the Barringer Meteor Crater impactors.

However, people young enough to experience this in 2046 should not build up their expectations. NASA or some other agency will likely succeed in displacing the asteroid's orbit enough to delay or eliminate this event.

Making my own development of the JWST raw Nircam data is a blast.

JWT spots dust storm on exoplanet.

Researchers observing with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have pinpointed silicate cloud features in a distant planet’s atmosphere. The atmosphere is constantly rising, mixing, and moving during its 22-hour day, bringing hotter material up and pushing colder material down. The resulting brightness changes are so dramatic that it is the most variable planetary-mass object known to date. The team, led by Brittany Miles of the University of Arizona, also made extraordinarily clear detections of water, methane and carbon monoxide with Webb’s data, and found evidence of carbon dioxide. This is the largest number of molecules ever identified all at once on a planet outside our solar system.

https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2023/news-2023-105

And another interesting astronomy story although not connected to JWT

Organic molecules have been detected in samples collected by Japan's Hayabusa2 mission from the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/21/world/ryugu-asteroid-organic-molecules-scn/index.html

As a longtime fan of the Panspermia thesis, can’t help but be interested.

JWT spots dust storm on exoplanet. — Wayfarer

And just how few years ago exoplanets were a hypothesis? I guess some 30 years ago, but I'm not sure just when it was generally accepted that we had proof. Now we have evidence of dust strorm on exoplanets.

Since Hubble and now JWT, there are plenty of exoplanets whose existence can be inferred from the data. But they're all so distant that their existence has no real significance, other than as scientific data.

But they're all so distant that their existence has no real significance, other than as scientific data. — Wayfarer

And earlier have had to be really big ones very close to a star or then have been in the perfect angle towards us (going in front of the star).