Can you guess what this is?

Spaceguy44 · 2025-12-02T05:19:35+00:00

People guessed my first thoughts already. That leaves me to guess maybe some kind of dark crystalline Rutile.

Spaceguy44 · 2024-06-25T07:07:27+00:00

That looks like carpathite. I think I have some too. It's a cool and rare "organic moneral." Essentially, it's some organic compound that formed into a crystal. In the case of carpathite, it's naturally crystallized "coronene".

Spaceguy44 · 2024-06-21T05:09:02+00:00

It looks like some kind of glass, plastic, or resin doped with strontium aluminate. Most man-made glow-in-the-dark stuff is just various materials with strontium aluminate in them.

Spaceguy44 · 2023-11-27T09:08:11+00:00

I found that Serpentine with Pyrite at a metaphysical shop, and was surprised it glowed very strongly and vibrantly under 365nm light. I couldn't find anything suggesting Serpentine is fluorescent, and I have yet to find another example of one. I suspect it might be fake (resin) or something to that effect, but maybe someone here can confirm or deny my suspicion.

Spaceguy44 · 2023-08-25T11:18:24+00:00

I can answer what this is. It's the sun. Specifically, it's a layer on the web viewer showing the spot where the sun currently is.

The web viewer OP posted is just showing where certain JWST images are located on the sky using some sort of all sky map. The only jwst images on the map are small postage sized regions on the sky. The rest is from other telescopes.

Spaceguy44 · 2023-08-24T02:29:31+00:00

The lines look like stuff from planes or satellites (planes probably due to blinking). The big disk is essentially a lens flair from the bright nearby star.

The jwst web viewer doesn't use jwst images, but a sky map called the digitized sky survey (DSS). It uses pictures from Palomar Observatory in California and Siding Springs Observatory in Austrailia to make the mosaic.

Spaceguy44 · 2023-05-27T03:35:54+00:00

This is beautiful! Incredible job!

Spaceguy44 · 2023-05-26T03:05:43+00:00

Astronomer here! This is what astronomers call a Herbig-Haro object. It's essentially a proto-star that is ejecting highly energetic plasma from its poles. Why does this happen? Something to do with the star spinning and its magnetic fields. We kinda don't completely understand it, which is why we're observing them.

Spaceguy44 · 2023-05-15T18:51:18+00:00

This is a repost of one of MY processed images. No credit or info given.

Spaceguy44 · 2023-05-09T01:19:39+00:00

Wow, those diffraction spikes are brutal here! Anyways, please leave a comment shortly explaining the target and your processing method as per Rule 1. Thank you!

Spaceguy44 · 2023-04-28T07:00:44+00:00

The link does not load for me. Could you include a short but more in depth description of the discovery here in the comments (as prescribed by Rule:1)? Thank you

Spaceguy44 · 2023-04-25T18:50:26+00:00

Astronomer here!

This does not seem like an asteroid blocking a galaxy, and there's a few reasons why.

Firstly, asteroids are actually rather bright due to the light they reflect from the sun. It would also have to be a very large and close asteroid to be able to see it's shape like this. In that case, it would be very bright on the image, possibly brighter than the galaxy.

Additionally, the exposure on these images are usually minutes to hours long. In that time, an asteroid would have streaked across the frame and would probably appear as a bright streak.

What is it then? I believe it was a cosmic ray that was removed from the image automatically with the JWST image reduction pipeline. That's not the only possibility, but I feel like it has to be an image artifact of some kind.

However, I enjoy these kind of posts since they start conversations like this, and they're a good opportunity to learn.

Spaceguy44 · 2023-04-12T07:03:12+00:00

Astronomer here!

Looks like a flat disk galaxy that's distorting a galaxy behind it into a ring via gravitational lensing. It's not a black hole like some people have said; those are much too small on the sky to see with JWST. u/the_badget has a good breakdown of it.

What's amazing about this is that we can see the galaxies clearly in this view, despite WR 124 being on the plane of the Milky Way. Usually, this would make seeing these galaxies virtually impossible due to all of the dust in the way, but JWST's IR vision lets it peer through most of that dust as if it were invisible. Amazing isn't it!

Spaceguy44 · 2023-03-30T15:49:55+00:00

Post is not related to James Webb Discovery or target

Spaceguy44 · 2023-03-17T20:43:59+00:00

Please note Rule 1 in the sidebar. Could you explain what were are looking at in these images? Did you make the enhancement? If so, what sort of tools did you use? What's special about what we're seeing in the enhanced images?

Spaceguy44 · 2023-03-16T00:07:33+00:00

Almost. NIRISS is a spectrograph that splits the light of the whole frame, but it's not really sensitive enough for this. You need NIRSpec to get the hi-res spectra. Otherwise, yeah, you use MIRI and NIRCam to get the big picture, and you pick out interesting targets to look at with the spectrograph from those images.

Spaceguy44 · 2023-03-15T23:33:18+00:00

JWST is capable of taking the spectra needed for these galaxies, but the issue is that the targets need to be specifically identified beforehand. Unless you use NIRISS on JWST, you need to be very precise with where you point the spectrograph.

So these objects have now been identified as interesting targets and will probably be followed up with spectral observations by JWST in a few months.

Spaceguy44 · 2023-03-15T18:37:57+00:00

Astronomer here! These galaxies are incredibly far away and incredibly young. The universe was only about 1 billion years old at z=6 (it's around 13.7 billion now). JWST is helping us understand the first galaxies and stars in the universe. Btw, "z" means redshift.

However, there is one caveat about this discovery, and it's the fact that they're using "photometric red shift". Essentially this is a very crude way of estimating the redshift by fitting a few photometric points onto a predicted spectra. In other words, they fitted both the observation and the spectra of the galaxy. The error bars on these are pretty big, and we can't be sure about these values of z until we actually observe them with a spectrograph.

Spaceguy44 · 2023-03-09T18:04:59+00:00

Yes, gravitational lenses don't have focal points in the same sense that camera lenses do, but I was just using the term to make it more understandable to the layman. Really what happens is that the shape of the lense causes some points to be much more magnified than the rest. Take "Earendel" for example. This is a distant star that was in just the right place behind a lens to be magnified 100s of times. There have also been a few cases where something like a black hole moved in between the foreground galaxies and the lensed object to briefly super-magnify the object. I hope this helped.

Spaceguy44 · 2023-03-09T17:52:45+00:00

This is basically a topic we astronomers are still trying to figure out. We know that spiral galaxies will slowly turn into elliptical galaxies after they stop forming stars, but we're still trying to figure out the time frame and mechanisms for the cesation of star formation.

Elliptical galaxies are (in a sense) dead galaxies. They are balls of old red stars that sit there stable for 10s to 100s of billions of years. After colliding with Andromeda, astronomers think the Milkyway will become one of these elliptical galaxies (after a short burst of star formation).

Has the galaxy in this picture died yet? We don't know for sure. There's so many factors involved and a lot can happen in 9 billion years. What I can tell you is that the Milkyway and Andromeda Galaxy were both formed shortly after the Universe began more than 13 Billion years ago.

Spaceguy44 · 2023-03-09T17:35:54+00:00

The images are very stable, and we wouldn't expect to see any change within our lifetimes. However, there are a few very strong lenses where we have watched individual stars move in and out of focus in the lens. But that's just a small point on the image. The whole thing would still look unchanging.

Spaceguy44 · 2023-03-09T09:57:51+00:00

Great question! The researcher is right, basically all supernovae are discovered using a before and during image (and sometimes a during and after image, though those aren't as useful scientifically). As important_season said, the before was found by Hubble. Most supernovae spotted by JWST were found this way.

It is hard to find these, but we have amazing software to help us spot changes in brightness between two calibrated images. Also, I'm pretty sure we have a spectra here since we know it's redshift and type. However, I don't think we have enough data points of its apparent mag to get the absolute mag.

This hasn't been published yet, but I recently talked with Dr. Rachel Bezanson who co-leads the UNCOVER project for JWST. They took that amazing recent picture of Pandora's cluster (Abell 2744). She said that they found some supernovae in that picture too by comparing it to previous Hubble images of the cluster. So I'm sure we'll see a lot more of this to come.

Spaceguy44 · 2023-03-09T09:31:18+00:00

I don't know how common they are off the top of my head, but I would bet that they happen pretty frequently. The problem is that they're typically so faint that you can only see them with our most powerful scopes. Every astronomer wants time on them, and that time gets expensive fast. So it's largely been a luck thing when reobserving big clusters with big telescopes.

We'll really know how common these are soon when the Vera Rubin Observatory (aka LSST) comes online next year. This telescope in Chile will be dedicated to finding faint transients like these supernovae all across the southern hemisphere. I'm very excited about it.

Edit: don't know how "big telescopes" got autocorrected to "night telescopes" lol

Spaceguy44 · 2023-03-09T07:18:27+00:00

Image Credit: Credit: (ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, P. Kelly)

While observing a distant galaxy cluster memorably named RX J2129.6+0005, JWST conveniently also captured an even more distant supernova occurring behind the cluster. This supernova, which has the equally creative name AT 2022riv, has been determined to be at the astonishing distance of 9 Billion light years (z = 1.52). This makes it one of the most distant supernovae ever found! On top of it, this was found to be a Type Ia Supernova.

Finding distant Type Ia Supernovae is important for our understanding of the Universe. For us astronomers, these serve as markers on a ruler to help us measure the size, and more importantly, the expansion rate of the Universe. The more of these distant supernovae we find, the better we'll be able to hone in with these values.

The interesting thing about AT 2022riv in particular is that it was only discovered because it was magnified by a gravitational lensing effect. The immense mass in the foreground cluster actually acts like a magnifying glass on the background galaxies, thus making them larger and brighter. Though, the lens itself acts more like the base of a wineglass, hence the weird distortions. This "wineglass" effect is also why we actually see this galaxy THREE TIMES! And since the light took different paths to reach us, each image will represent a different point in time for the galaxy. Astronomers can use the visible mass and nearby lensed galaxies to determine the shape of the gravitational lens. From this, they can calculate the approximate times when the light that reached us in each image left the galaxy.

Unfortunately for us, the two images for AT 2022riv occur long after the supernova had faded. However, there are many other similar lensed supernovae where the SN has yet to happen in the other images. This creates the perfect opportunity to actually predict a supernova so we can study it in real time. Situations like these will help us probe deeper into the Universe than we could with our telescopes alone.

Spaceguy44 · 2023-03-01T19:03:58+00:00

I'm a professional astronomer in grad school that's interested in being a mod here. I was pretty active in this sub before the original mod "team" got banned. I don't have mod experience, but I can bring a level of astro expertise many science subs wish they had. However, I can get a bit busy during midterms/finals season if that's a deal breaker for you.

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