That’s a beautiful article showcasing our predicament in having access to more information about the universe. Now i have to be the one to ask the dumb defensive question:

what makes us so certain that we can trust what we see on James Webb? Can we definitely discard a measurement problem?

JWST has 4 different instruments on it. While they all share the same focusing mirrors, but otherwise are 4 different measurement devices.

For the red dot observations, I believe this things have been measured by at least 3 of the 4 devices on board - NIRCam (near infrared camera, has very limited spectral capabilities through its filter wheel), NIRSpec (near infrared spectrograph) and MIRI (mid infrared instrument).

I cannot pretend to have the actual expertise, but it does seem vanishingly unlikely that all 3 instruments could create consistent artefacts in the same location.

Some of the Hubble results were also raising questions. At the same time, I read one of the papers on the galaxy stuff, and what struck me was they were identifying galaxy shapes by counting the pixels each galaxy had, so there are definitely some question marks over how they do some of this.

> what makes us so certain that we can trust what we see on James Webb?

We can trust what we see. We can't trust there's nothing where we don't see anything.

This is one reason to dislike the NASA process of building one huge prestige telescope every few decades.

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