Astronomers using #NASAWebb identified two stars that generate carbon-rich dust in our Milky Way. When the stars in Wolf-Rayet 140 swing by one another on their elongated orbits, their winds collide and produce dust that expands outward: webbtelescope.pub/42bqgOP #AAS245 🔭 🧪 - ThreadSky

About ThreadSky

spacetelescope.bsky.social • 41 days ago

Astronomers using #NASAWebb identified two stars that generate carbon-rich dust in our Milky Way. When the stars in Wolf-Rayet 140 swing by one another on their elongated orbits, their winds collide and produce dust that expands outward: https://webbtelescope.pub/42bqgOP #AAS245 🔭 🧪

Comments

cosmos4u.bsky.social•41 days ago

During the press conference it was mentioned that the diffraction spikes had been deliberately (partially) removed - was that done by mathematical deconvolution or manually as with the original press release of the first image?

astroprofhoff.bsky.social•38 days ago

Hi, sorry for the delay! It's been a busy week!

Quick answer is "neither." @emmalieb.bsky.social created a model of the JWST point-spread function, then aligned and scaled it to match the science image, then subtracted it.

astroprofhoff.bsky.social•38 days ago

For more details, see our paper: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ad9aa9 . Thanks for the question!

cosmos4u.bsky.social•38 days ago

Yes, thanks, had already found the paper, read the relevant paragraph - and wonder: could that PSF reduction procedure become part of the standard NIRCam processing pipeline? Overlapping PSFs in crowded fields can become quite annoying when you're looking for faint features between the bright ones.

astroprofhoff.bsky.social•38 days ago

Yes, we did work with STScI staff on it, and we're certainly hoping that this technique will help others with their JWST image analysis!

astroprofhoff.bsky.social•37 days ago

I think there are other groups looking specifically at crowded-field use cases, where the details might be somewhat different -- but the subtraction is definitely an additional exciting outcome of this project!

dailychitchat.bsky.social•41 days ago

That’s cool 😎

Posting Rules

Be respectful to others
No spam or self-promotion
Stay on topic
Follow Bluesky's terms of service

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply