Updated at 10:39 am on August 11, 2022
Recently, a French physicist posted an image online that he described as simply remarkable. The image, Étienne Klein said, was taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, the world’s newest and most powerful space observatory. It showed Proxima Centauri, a star about 4.2 light-years from us, our sun’s closest neighbor, Klein explained in his tweet. “This level of detail,” he said, astonishment evident. “A new world is revealed day after day.”
You may have already seen the image, which has gone viral: a deep red sphere suspended in the dark like ink, its surface smoothly textured with glowing dots. By now, you might as well know the truth: that’s not a star. It’s sausage, a cross section of chorizo, to be precise. Klein’s Proxima Centauri was a joke, and thousands of people had fallen for it.
Photo of Proxima du Centaure, l’étoile la plus proche du Soleil, situated at 4.2 année-lumière de nous.
Elle a été Prize par le JWST.
Ce level de détails… A nouveau world is revealed jour après jour. pic.twitter.com/88UBbHDQ7Z
— Etienne KLEIN (@EtienneKlein) July 31, 2022
“According to contemporary cosmology, no object belonging to the Spanish delicatessen exists anywhere other than on Earth,” Klein said after confessing.
His timing was impeccable. The temptation to scoff at space-related wonders, and the urge to marvel at any new image that purported to be a new view of our universe, was at its peak. NASA and other space agencies had just spent weeks promoting the release of the first images from the Webb telescope. All astronomers could talk about was how good Webb would be, how he would capture the universe in unprecedented detail. In July, the first batch of Webb images were widely shared, and the public was primed for more, ready to retweet brilliant content in an environment where pretty space pictures are unlikely to be scrutinized for accuracy. Furthermore, the image seemed to come from a reliable source, a blue-checked user, a research director at the very important-sounding Atomic and Alternative Energies Commission in France.
As far as misinformation goes, Klein’s prank (made first by an astrophysicist, Peter Coles) was pretty innocuous. And it was a pretty good joke. But like much viral disinformation, the space sausage succeeded in part because it hit on an element of truth. There’s a reason so many of us were willing to buy it, and it’s not NASA’s advertising machine or the Internet being the Internet. The reality is that many things in space actually look like cured meats from afar. And the James Webb Space Telescope is going to show us.
The telescope is designed to observe infrared light from the most distant galaxies that existed just after the Big Bang. These deeper cuts, the farthest targets, will appear as blurred red orbs. Fuzzy because, well, we’re going back 13 billion years in time! Even Webb cannot resolve the detailed structures of the most distant galaxies. And they’ll be red because that’s the hue astronomers use to color data, to convey the extended nature of the longer wavelengths of incoming light. Yes, Webb can capture closer galaxies in dazzling, almost unreal detail, every pixel twinkling; More sights await, like the glowing cliffs of the Carina Nebula and the shimmering rays of the Cartwheel Galaxy. But we’re also about to get a lot more red spots. Red spots that, if you squint a little, could look like a piece of sausage.
Consider this recent image of Webb, which astronomers were very excited about. Nothing about this speck can tell you that this is a distant galaxy that humanity has never detected before, that what you are looking at is a collection of stars as they appeared just 300 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe burst into existence. in a spectacular and mysterious moment. That this red spot is a big problem.
(Tommaso Treu/Pascal Oesch/NASA/CSA/ESA/STScI)
My job as a science journalist is to explain this to others, to do what Klein did with the space sausage: assign meaning, importance, and even wonder to a red spot. And often, conveying something of cosmic importance requires starting small, with familiar language. Many science journalists, myself included, have described inscrutable images of supermassive black holes as donuts, because they do look like donuts, and unlike extremely complicated and mind-boggling astrophysics, donuts are quite accessible. Webb’s image of the faraway, fuzzy galaxy seemed to me like looking at a tomato before putting on my contact lenses, but perhaps if he weren’t a pescetarian, he would have described it as a fuzzy slice of salami. All of this is to say that we’ve seen other very real versions of the space sausage before, and we’ve marveled at them in shades of awe.
Just days after the space sausage went viral, astronomers released this image, which was processed with data from an Australian radio telescope. These are the aftermath of a supernova, the remnants of a burned out and exploded star, somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 light-years away. Doesn’t it look like a meatball?
(Dr Wasim Raja/CSIRO; Dr Pascal Elah/Pawsey)
Even our own sun looks, in some perspectives, like something you’d find on a charcuterie board. Here’s a composite image from the Solar Dynamics Observatory, a NASA spacecraft that studies the sun, produced in 2012. That little black dot in the upper left is the shadow of Venus, passing by in a rare cosmic alignment that won’t return. to occur until 2117. Pretty wild! But all of this also looks like a slice of pepperoni.
(NASA/SDO; AIA)
Many of Webb’s targets will be impossible to confuse with deli meats. The Proxima Centauri of Klein’s prank will clearly appear as a star to Webb; bright and shiny, the light diffracts into graceful spikes. But some celestial objects, particularly those distant galaxies that Webb was specially designed to detect, will look so red and spherical, so… sausage-like. Astronomers are well aware of how exciting space pictures of him can look. “I can see why people fell in love,” Rohan Naidu, a Harvard astronomer who is using Webb to discover distant galaxies (including the one that looked like a tomato), told me. “We’ve been selling you these red tomatoes too, haven’t we?”
This article originally said that a Webb image depicts a galaxy 300 billion years after the Big Bang. In fact, it represents the galaxy 300 million years after the Big Bang.
Source: www.theatlantic.com