Why stars look pointed in this image from the James Webb Space Telescope
The stars in new images from the James Webb Space Telescope look sharper than ever. And I’m not just talking about image quality, which is amazing. I’m talking about the fact that many of the bright stars in photos have very distinct nails that look like Christmas ornaments or, as one of my colleagues put it, “look like JJ Abrams promotional posters, and I love that. ” But this is not the case Lens flare too much. These are diffraction spikes, and if you look closely, you will see that all the bright objects in the JWST image have the same eight-dot pattern. The brighter the light, the clearer the gain. Faint objects such as nebulae or galaxies don’t tend to see much of this distortion. This yaw spike pattern is a unique pattern in JWST. If you compare the photos taken with the new telescope to the images taken by its predecessors, you will see that Hubble has only four diffraction heights to eight at JWST. (Two of the JWST spikes can be very dim, so sometimes ...