Let me state for the record that **I am not trolling**, and I am blown away by the imagery as much as the next person.
But what can we do with this new information? Where does it take us? How does it help us?
What’s next?
In: 262
The pretty images that gets published only use a part of the vast dataset collected each time. The full dataset does not just contain the colors of each pixel but its full spectral dataset where we can identify elements such as hydrogen and carbon, even isotopes. So we know the exact composition of all that gas and stars and galaxies. From the amount of redshift we know how fast they are going and therefore how far away they are, how fast the galaxies are spinning and so on. We find groups of galaxies orbiting each other. We can even reconstruct their exact possitions, not what we see, which means we can find out how the light bent on the way to Earth. From this we can create maps of where the mass in the universe is and find clouds of dark matter. There is so much more information we might gather from this telescope then what you see in the picture, it just takes a lot longer to calculate and understand.
The goal of this is to find things that does not match our theories. There is a very high chance that our current scientific theories are not quite right, but only match our current observations. We know this both from experience and because we have contradicting theories and theories which matches almost all our observations. By making more observations and find more data that does not match the theories we can improve upon these theories. If we know how our theories are wrong and by how much we can better understand how to come up with the correct ones.
It is hard to speculate on what som knew unknown theory based on yet to be studies scientific data might mean. But the theories which governed long time ago in a galaxy far far away still govern Earth. It just might be that we have been unable to recreate the conditions required for us to observe it, but those might be observed out there. But once we know about the theories we can construct conditions to take advantage of them here. Maybe we findally crack the problem of a working warp drive, we already have designs which should work with current theories but not current economics.
To give you a simple example fitting for this subreddit the closest nuclear fusion we have is the Sun. And even then we needed to study various different stars and compare them to each other to figure out how stars evolve to figure out what fusion reactions take place on the Sun. And now we are using that data when building working fusion reactors on Earth to solve our power problems. There are currently several research reactors and they have just managed to technically make power. If we had not studied the stars we would never have discovered fusion. Not only from observing fusion on the Sun but a lot of other scientific discoveries done by telescopes and other astronomical instruments. So who can tell what possible discoveries we might get from the JWST to help us here on Earth.
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