Many astronomers started analysing data from the James Webb Space Telescope right after the first batch was released in July, and quickly posted their results on preprint servers — but are now having to revise them
Figuring out how to redo the work is “thorny and annoying”, says Marco Castellano, an astronomer at the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics in Rome. “There’s been a lot of frustration,” says Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “I don’t think anybody really expected this to be as big of an issue as it’s becoming,” adds Guido Roberts-Borsani, an astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles.
This is the first scientific image released from the Webb telescope publicly, on 11 July, showing a deep-field look at the sky that includes a number of distant galaxies.The STScI made it clear that the initial calibrations to the telescope were rough, says Jane Rigby, operations project scientist for Webb at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Much of the issue stems from the fact that Webb,, is a new telescope whose details are still being worked out.
Within days of the first Webb data release, non-peer-reviewed papers began appearing on the arXiv preprint server, reporting multiple candidates for the most distant galaxy ever recorded. These studies relied on the brightness of distant objects, measured with Webb at various wavelengths. Then, on 29 July, the STScI released an updated set of calibrations that were substantially different from what astronomers had been working with.