Today, Explained - FYI those telescope photos are kinda fake

Episode Date: July 20, 2022

But the images from the Webb Space Telescope still provide our best look yet at the formation of the universe. NASA astrophysicist Amber Straughn and science journalist Josh Sokol unpack humanity’s newest glimpse at the cosmos. This episode was produced by Victoria Chamberlin, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Mounsey, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If I was actually shooting by the Carina Nebula in a spaceship, would it actually look like that? No, it would not actually look like this. I have to confess, it would not. Whoa! It would still look really cool. Coming up on Today Explained, photos from the James Webb Telescope broke the internet last week,

and we're just getting started. We're starting to get a hint to learn what these distant galaxies are made of because we've never been able to see that before. But they're also a digital representation of something no human could ever see with their own eyes. Yeah, well the raw data is black and white, or I challenge you to imagine something even more abstract. Earth is hot and stressful,

so we're going deep on deep space today. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. Good morning. Good morning, everyone. We are live and this is it.

Today is the day we have all been waiting for. So let's get excited. I am Amber Straughan, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. And I'm Sean Ramos-Verm, one of two hosts at Today Explained. Dr. Amber Straughan is on a first-name basis with the James Webb Space Telescope. I am a scientist on the team at NASA for JWST. James Webb Space Telescope's friends just call it JWST. And I've been in this role for 11, 12 years now, officially, and I've been working on it even before then as a postdoc and grad student. So it's been a while.

Which means she saw these mind-expanding images before they were cool. I mean, I don't think you have to be an astronomer to appreciate the beauty of these images. And I think, you know, the past 30 years of Hubble has demonstrated that. The public loves Hubble because of these beautiful images. And I don't know exactly why that is. It's a little strange that they're just sort of, it's a universal human experience to be sort of awed by the beauty of the universe. And I think that was the exact reaction. Although I don't think people actually know in cases, exactly what they're looking at.

So we were wondering if you could help us with that part of it. So broadly speaking, these first five images that were released sort of span a breadth of different science topics, ranging from exoplanets. About the size of Jupiter, about half the mass of Jupiter. It orbits around a sun-like star, but it does it every about three and a half days. To looking at regions of star birth and star death. There are galaxies here in which you're seeing individual clusters of stars forming,

popping up just like popcorn. To other galaxies. Light from some of the most distant galaxies in that image has been traveling over 13 billion years. So we are literally seeing galaxies as they were in the distant past, which is exactly what this telescope was designed to discover. So the James Webb telescope is essentially a time machine. That is literally true. And it sounds sort of, you know, sci-fi, but it's actually due to a very sort of

basic principle of physics. And that is the fact that light takes time to travel. You're seeing a lamppost across the street. Light from that takes a tiny fraction of a second to reach your eye. The light from the sun takes about eight minutes to get to the earth. So in essence, you're seeing the sun as it was eight minutes ago. Putting these powerful telescopes in space allows us to see things as they were literally back in time. It's amazing. It's actually, it's the true definition

of the word amazing. I couldn't agree more. Which of the images have been the widest circulated do you know my sense is just from like looking at all the media reports and stuff that the people have fallen in love with the deep filled image uh and also the karina nebula those two seem to be the ones that i've seen popping up but all of them are spectacular for their own reasons. Let me pull up the deep field image first. There's a lot going on in this image. Where do you even begin to start talking about it? I guess, what are we seeing broadly? Where are we? It's so much to take in, but I guess the first sort of thing to know about this image

is it's a teeny tiny piece of sky. If you held a grain of sand out at arm's length, that's the amount of sky we're seeing here, which is incredible, right? And in this grain of sand, we're seeing thousands of galaxies. I mean, it's absolutely incredible. And to go a little bit more in detail, the sort of fuzzy white galaxies we see near the center of the image, those are making up a galaxy cluster. Those are further away. They're sort of in the background. And essentially what's happening in this image, and the reason you get those little arcs, is that the combined mass of the fuzzy white galaxies, and also crucially, their dark matter, is serving as this giant cosmic lens. And so when light travels sort of through the universe from these distant galaxies and hits the mass of this galaxy cluster, it gets bent and stretched out. So that's what all these

arcs that you're seeing are. Sort of like, you know, looking through the bottom of like a glass and you see how light gets weird and distorted. So proving once again that Einstein was right. Right about what? The way the universe works and the way that mass can actually bend light. in which energy is put equal to mass multiplied with the square of the velocity of light, showed that very small amount of mass may be converted into a very large amount of energy. Is like anything we're seeing a star? Yes, the bright points of light that have spikes around them, so you can see several of those, those are actually stars within our own Milky Way galaxy, so relatively nearby.

Okay. So anything with a spike is a star. Everything else, every other point of light is a galaxy. And of course, again, just to sort of go back to, you know, high school astronomy class, a galaxy is a grouping of stars. Our own Milky Way galaxy has a couple hundred billion stars. And so each point of light you see in this image, aside from the individual stars with spikes, every other point of light is an individual galaxy itself probably with hundreds of billions of stars. Okay. So that's like, that is actually mind blowing because what you're saying is that the galaxies greatly, greatly outnumber the few spiky stars we're seeing in this photo, right? Absolutely. The data is brand new, so we haven't done an actual count yet. But just by looking at

this, I mean, there are thousands, right? There are thousands of galaxies here and just a few stars within the sort of foreground of the Milky Way. So there's thousands of galaxies here, which contain billions of stars. This photo is representative of holding a grain of sand up to the sky at arm's length. Yeah. Right? Right, right. It starts to give you a little tiny bit of a sense of just how big the universe is. And is the James Webb telescope going to sort of pivot on an axis

and give us all the other grains of sand? What happens after this? Well, that would, of course, take a very long time. But the good news is that taking these little teeny tiny snapshots of the universe helps to give us a sense of what the rest of the universe is like. It's sort of just statistics. Because one of the fundamental assumptions in astrophysics is that the universe is sort of the same in all directions, roughly speaking. So you can imagine that point anywhere in the sky and you would see roughly this many galaxies. Now that's a little bit, maybe not quite

true because this is a galaxy cluster in the foreground. But of course we have examples from Hubble and we will soon have examples from JWST of just sort of clear deep fields, like deep fields of galaxies without the intervening galaxy cluster here. Incredible as that is, let's pivot to another photo here, one that Marina Koren at The Atlantic called the coolest space picture I've ever seen. And this is, of course, the aforementioned nebula, Carina Nebula. Is that right? This was the image that made me cry when I first saw it.

You know, it's just so stunningly beautiful. And I love how it, I mean, it sort of brings the universe to life, right? You can see texture and structure and depth. It's gorgeous. And what exactly is it? It looks like some sort of like cotton candy cloud out in deep space. Yeah, well, maybe not cotton candy, but it is sort of a cloud. So the Carina Nebula, which the team sort of nicknamed Cosmic Cliffs, which I think is great. But the Carina Nebula, which the team sort of nicknamed Cosmic Cliffs, which I think is great. But the Carina Nebula is a relatively nearby star forming region within our Milky Way galaxy.

It's about 7,600 light years away. So, you know, relatively nearby. But it's basically a stellar nursery. So the orange stuff you see in this image is basically gas and dust. And then above the sort of ridge of the nebula here, up above sort of out of the frame of view, are some really hot, young, gigantic stars. And these stars have immense amounts of radiation and stellar winds. And so you can imagine that radiation and wind is sort of pushing down on this region of gas and dust. And these processes are some of what help newborn stars to form. So it really is, you know, a stellar nursery. What is the information collected thus far by the telescope reveal about the universe that we didn't already know? The type of light this telescope sees, this is infrared light,

which is light that's a little bit more red than what your eyes can see. And this is the first time we've ever gotten a spectrum of an exoplanet in these certain longer wavelengths of light, which is super exciting. But in terms of what we've learned, this is just a first look. And so scientists are already busy sort of digging into the data. But the most impressive thing to me was this chemical, you know, fingerprint of this extremely distant galaxy. We're starting to get a hint to learn what these distant galaxies are made of because we've never been able to see that before. And this was one of the main drivers for building this telescope the way that we did. So, you know, over the course of the last 30 years with Hubble, we've been able to learn incredible things about galaxies, about how the

universe works in the sense of how galaxies change over time. And with Hubble, we've been able to look back pretty far into the distant past. But Hubble was not able to see the very first epic of galaxies that were born after the Big Bang. So we're talking about looking back in time about 13 and a half billion years into the past. That's a part of space we have never seen before. And this telescope was designed to find those first galaxies. And this very first deep field image was a relatively short image. It's just like a snapshot. And what we see, what this image shows us is that we will be able to do that. We think we will be able to learn what that first epoch of galaxies was like, that set off the whole evolution of the universe.

That thing Dr. Amber Straughan from NASA said about this telescope seeing infrared light, that's the reason all of these images have been painstakingly doctored. More on that in a minute on Today Explained. Sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, and Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an Aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an Aura frame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case,

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If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. This isn't a spaceship. It's a time machine. Welcome back. Today Explained, Joshua Sokol is a freelance science writer, and he wrote recently

in the New York Times about how NASA went about selecting James Webb images for public consumption. We got him on the show because I had this sort of burning question. So Joshua, I was reading lots of articles about these James Webb images because, of course, they were mind-blowing, and I wanted to learn more. And then buried deep in one of them, not the headline, not in the first few graphs, but towards the end, by the way, all of these images you're seeing have been doctored? Is that true? I mean, yes. Yes, it is true. They're all mediated.

Mediated? Is that a euphemism? well there's technology interfering between what's out there in the universe and what you're seeing and this is kind of something that we accept in other situations you know our phone cameras and our cameras in general digital cameras all kind of are creating a vision of reality

they're trying to create something that mimics what our eyes do but it it's not exactly real, I guess. I see what you're saying there, because I've noticed I recently went from an iPhone 5 to an iPhone 13. And what I'm noticing now, especially when I take photos at night, is that my iPhone's rendering of events, this iPhone 13, is actually much better lit than what I actually see with my human eye, which is the more accurate reality? Is that like an existential question? Yeah, it gets philosophical really quick.

I mean, if you think about the romantic notion of an astronomer as somebody who puts their eye up to the lens of a telescope and looks at the universe and they perceive it all through their eyeball, the reality hasn't been like that for a while. And also, that's not the way our photography works. We're creating almost like a data visualization of your iPhone or the telescope. It creates an array of numbers. It takes in some data from the universe. And then there's this added step of like, how do we want to visualize that?

Do we want to make it look exactly mimicking how your eye might see it? Granted that people's eyes are different and lighting conditions are different, you know, or are you trying to show other things? So what you're saying is the telescope's up there capturing ones and zeros. And the question is, how do we want to represent those ones and zeros. And the question is, how do we want to represent those ones and zeros? The telescope is not up there to make really, really cool pictures. It's up there to take data about what's in the universe. And what this kind of breaks down to is like, in every pixel of this image, how much light do we see from the universe? And that's all that the telescope wants to do. Everything past that

point of how would it look to us and how can we visually communicate what it's seeing and what it's doing, that's all a little bit subjective, a little bit of interpretation. It is a data visualization. What's coming across their desks in its raw form? Is it black and white? Yeah, well, the raw data is black and white. Or I challenge you to imagine something even more abstract. Huh. What it really is, is an array of numbers. And the array of numbers is just like,

how bright was the universe in each pixel? Like, this pixel saw 100 photons from this crazy galaxy, and this one saw a little bit less. And it's just an array of numbers. What astronomers do on their computers is like immediately translate that into a black and white, like a grayscale image of, let's see it. That will help me understand it, because I don't want to look at just a matrix code, you know, I want to see an image. So the really raw is the array of numbers. The kind of, the way that then that's visualized is like, let's translate this into an image, a digital image, black and white image, for sure. Does that feel sort of distinct from the way,

say, our smartphones, our Google Pixels, and our iPhone 13s are interpreting a landscape photo shot at night. Because here, you're talking about actual black and white, ones and zeros, numbers of photons, and then what you end up with is this sort of stunning image of the Carina Nebula, which people actually look at and can't believe what they're seeing, and it sort of turns out, well, that isn't exactly what anyone saw. I think there's an analogy that holds up pretty well between the phone and the telescope,

and then it breaks down towards the end. The way that our cameras, our regular cameras work is they're also really creating arrays of numbers, black and white images, and then they're combining them, and they're creating, they're assigning colors to them, digitally combining them. They're showing, they're assigning colors to them, digitally combining them. They're showing us something that makes visual sense.

A lot of times their goal is to recreate kind of how our eyes work and do something that looks like the kinds of things we see, but they might punch it up in certain ways because they're also trying to create something that's pleasing to us and contains the information about the scene that we want to see. The thing is, when your phone does this, you're not involved in the process at all. It's all underneath the hood in a black box.

And what's happened with these telescope images is there were people involved at every step, decisions made at every step, and it's just much more intentional about what is being communicated in the images. If I was actually shooting by the Carina Nebula in a spaceship, would it actually look like that? No, it would not actually look like this. I have to confess it would not.

Whoa. It would still look really cool. Bummer. What would it look like i mean it would look cloudy and you would see a lot of these structures and you would definitely see less color with your eyes and you cheated a little bit in your example because you said you're there in a spaceship like at warp speed so you're still implying there's this technological mediation going on to get you close to this thing that I promise you no human being in the next thousand years will ever be close to. Corona Nebula, visually your eyes could see a lot of cloudiness, a lot of structure, a lot of color. It would not be this vivid. It's fake in the sense that

all images are sort of fake, but it's hyper real. It's super humanly real. It's beyond what you could do. And like, that's what's cool about it too. It seems like such an enormous responsibility because these images are essentially now the historical record. I mean, they have entered the public consciousness and that's how people will think about James Webb. How does NASA walk the line between getting the public excited about what this telescope is doing and representing fairly what it's actually seeing? These images are a conscious act of visual communication. Part of that is almost brand management. It's like communicating, hey, here's this thing that we do that's very legible to the average person, this amazing image that you can appreciate and see.

So it'll make the argument that the telescope that cost all this taxpayer money is worthwhile, that and it's functioning well, um, that it, that it's capable of, of doing amazing things. That's kind of a cynical thing, almost, you know, we want to inform public perception of what this large public project is doing. The other part is that NASA is required with its spending to explain

itself, to do science communication. So you could also imagine the telescope is just taking all this really technical data, but it's not showing anything. Nobody benefits from the knowledge generated. So there is this very genuine, earnest desire in the people that work on this to show, like, this is how we see the universe. This is what we can learn about it. This is what you paid for. Let me explain how it works. The colors are not fake to convince people to fund NASA more. The colors are punched up and combined and made aesthetically pleasing to communicate real information about just how precisely the telescope can see the universe.

That it can really see this thing that looks red in the image, that's this stuff out in space. And this blue in the image is a totally different physical process. And hey, look, isn't it amazing that we built this thing that can tell that difference? I mean, it's better than what our eyes can see. It's more informative. And that's why they're doing it.

And if they released it in black and white, no one would care. If they released it in black and white, they'd be showing off less of what the thing's true capabilities are. And they would be less impactful on an audience. They would be boring. Joshua Sokol is a freelance science writer. Earlier in the show, you heard from Dr. Amber Strawn. She's with NASA.

Our program today was produced by Victoria Chamberlain, Matthew Collette edited, Laura Bullard fact-checked, Paul Mounsey engineered. We had help from our friends at Unexplainable, especially Dr. Brian Resnick. They just re-released their two-episode series on the James Webb Space Telescope.

If you want to hear more about what exactly this telescope is looking for in outer space, look for Unexplainable wherever you listen. This is Today Explained. Thank you.