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First-ever James Webb Space Telescope image revealed

Anonymous Coward
Boffin

No, and it will not do so. The spikes come from three things: the overall shape of the mirror, the edges of the mirror segments and the struts which hold the secondary mirror.

The first two you cannot do without (the design of the struts is chosen so that their spikes overlap with those from the mirror segments).

The last one you cannot do without if you wish to have a mirror which contains individually adjustable segments, or which can be folded up for launch. You could by building really enormous spacecraft deal with the second, but you still need the first for very large mirrors.

Note that the spikes are extremely dim compared to the image: the reason they appear so bright in this image is that there are foreground stars which are extremely bright compared to the objects of interest in the image which are therefore grossly overexposed in this very long exposure.

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