MEMPHIS, Tenn. – Side-by-side images of NASA’s 32-year-old Hubble Space Telescope and the brand new James Webb Space Telescope may draw oohs and ahhs, but they don’t give you a full picture of how many more astronomers are getting some new stuff on the cosmic block.
Fortunately, new data visualization tools can bring you closer to the sense of wonder these astronomers feel.
“Audiences are just presented with these beautiful images, and they think, ‘Oh, wow, that’s awesome,'” says Harvard astronomer Alyssa Goodman. “But in my opinion, they could learn a lot more from these images.”
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Goodman presented strategies for gaining a better appreciation for JWST — and a better appreciation for the technologies that are transforming modern astronomy — this week at the 2022 ScienceWriters conference in Memphis.
Goodman was struck by the difference between public perception and astronomer appreciation when the first-ever JWST image was unveiled at the White House in July. President Joe Biden and other administration officials were wowed by the twinkling galaxies in the telescope’s first ultra-deep field image. But Goodman couldn’t help but think of data visualization guru Edward Tufte’s caveat about quantitative assessments: “Compared to what?
To bring the comparison home, Goodman tweeted what she called “probably the worst video I’ve done in 10 years”, in which she compared the JWST image to other images accessible through the AAS WorldWide Telescope interactive database. “Let’s just zoom in, take a look insidecredibility-ible detail, then zoom out to give you a picture of what a tiny piece of heaven that really is. But my, what a great, great picture,” she said in the video, using a tone reminiscent of Julia Child talking about coq au vin.
The quick Twitter clip drew 1.5 million views — not bad for a video that Goodman intended to share only with his friends. This suggests there’s a large audience for deep dives into data visualization, especially if it has to do with the boundaries of the universe. “You can’t really appreciate how awesome it is until you start changing the background layer to whatever you want,” Goodman said.
And you don’t have to take her word for it: there’s a page on the WorldWide Telescope website that lets you zoom in and browse the first set of JWST images yourself.
Another example involves one of Hubble’s most famous images: the Pillars of Creation, a star-forming region also known as the Eagle Nebula. Last week, NASA released the JWST version of the same image, setting off another round of oohs and ahhs. Once again, Goodman answered the question “Compared to what”.
“If you look very carefully, you can see differences,” she said. “I actually find it visually striking, but as an astronomer it’s kind of boring, okay? Because again, it doesn’t show you what’s important.
Goodman pointed to an opening in the nebula’s dust clouds that was much clearer in the JWST view.
“The idea is that in the infrared… how important it is that you can see through the dust, small solid particles and interstellar medium that float between stars, which obscure our background view of so many things, including the beginning universe,” she said.
3D visualization adds another dimension to our appreciation of astronomical imagery. A 3D map of the region around our sun, based on data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia telescope, has helped Goodman and his colleagues figure out that a wave of star formation is driven by a bubble of interstellar gas expanding from supernova explosions.
“It was just us playing around with the data in three dimensions, and then later doing a very detailed physical model of the motions of stars and the explosion of supernovae,” she said. “It looks like we’ve got it all figured out, but the truth is, it was a lot of data mining.”
Exploration of 3D computer-generated models led not only to the discovery of the “local bubble”, but also to the discovery of the Radcliffe wave, an undulating structure of dust and gas in our galaxy of the Path. milky.
Goodman said computer simulations have become so useful that you might think of them as a third element of the discovery process, alongside theory and observations. She cited a research paper titled “AI-Assisted Super-Resolution Cosmological Simulations” as an example.
“There are several newspapers like this,” she said. “It’s probably the most expanding field of cosmology right now.”
And perhaps the most exciting aspect of astronomical simulations is that they can be shared with the public. “It’s gotten to the point where if you’re careful, the same software that’s used to find things out can be made available to the public and can be published with the results,” Goodman said.
To facilitate this sharing, Goodman is part of a team working on an open source data visualization package called “glue”. Glue is optimized for JWST data analysis, and the team plans to make the Python-based package easier to use by incorporating it into a widely used interactive computing platform known as Jupyter (resulting in a hybrid nicknamed “glupyter”). Such tools could be used not only to visualize astronomical data, but also to analyze geospatial data, brain scans or genetic code.
Goodman demonstrated how a 3D data visualization could fit in the palm of your hand, using a specially printed cube and an augmented reality app. When you point your smartphone at the cube, you can see what appears to be a 3D view of molecular clouds in our corner of the Milky Way. Spin around the cube, and the 3-D model also twists.
Will it ever be possible to juggle computer models of planetary systems, galaxies and the entire universe in augmented reality, powered by JWST data? For astronomers, that “one day” is already here – and it’s coming soon for the rest of us.
Goodman’s Patrusky lecture presentation, “The New Universe,” was part of this week’s ScienceWriters 2022 conference in Memphis, which was organized by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing and the National Association of Science Writers. and hosted by St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Alan Boyle is a volunteer member of the CASW Board of Directors. Check out this page on the Harvard University website for additional resources, including presentation slides and links to Seamless Astronomy and Dimensions of Discovery.
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