Why Stars Look Sharp In Images From The James Webb Space Telescope
But this is not a case of excessive lens flare. These are diffraction peaks, and if you look closely, you’ll see that all the bright objects in the JWST images have the same eight-ray pattern. The brighter the light, the more prominent the feature. Faint objects such as nebulae or galaxies tend not to see as much of this distortion. This pattern of diffraction peaks is unique to JWST. If you compare the images taken by the new telescope with the images taken by its predecessor, you will notice that Hubble has only four diffraction peaks compared to JWST’s eight....