Webb's new image of IC 348 shows brown dwarfs, objects too small to be stars

science & techESA/Webb

Webb's new image of IC 348 shows brown dwarfs, objects too small to be stars

the gist

The James Webb Space Telescope has imaged IC 348, a star-forming region about 1,000 light-years away. It is one of the largest Webb images released to the public so far. Using the sensitivity of its NIRCam instrument, the telescope picked out a population of brown dwarfs. These objects are smaller than the smallest stars, and the image tracks down the faintest of them. The view reveals how the region is populated across a wide range of masses.

so what

Brown dwarfs are hard to find because they are faint, so the image helps astronomers count the smallest objects that form alongside stars. That gives a more complete picture of how stellar nurseries produce objects of all sizes.

fun fact

Brown dwarfs are too small to sustain hydrogen fusion in their cores as stars do.

more on this

background

IC 348 is a star-forming region in the constellation Perseus, just south of the bright star Omicron Persei. It is located about 1,000 light years from the Sun. Together with NGC 1333 it is part of the Perseus molecular cloud. It consists of nebulosity and an associated 2-million-year-old cluster of roughly 400 stars within an angular diameter of 20″. A later work found an older age of about 5 million years. The most massive stars in the cluster are the binary star system HD 281159 (BD+31°643), which has a combined spectral class of B5, and is surrounded by an accretion disk. This binary is surrounded by an incomplete spherical shell open to the northwest, 50,000 AU in diameter, seen in infrared images from Spitzer and JWST.

From Wikipedia: IC 348 (CC BY-SA 4.0) ↗

see

Hypatia Alexandria from Santa Fe, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, and K. Luhman (Penn State University…, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA · CC BY 4.0

Image: ESA/Webb

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historyThe Public Domain Review1909 · United States

D. W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909)

the gist

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.

how it works

To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.

so what

A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.

the bigger pattern

Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.

fun fact

In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.

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