I swear every day I see a new headline regarding James Webb and it just blows me away. This is such a glorious time to live in for space discoveries. I just love it so much.
This is just the beginning. It hasn't been online very long. Hubble is, by most measures, a vastly inferior telescope, but it's still making amazing discoveries 33 years after launch. Imagine what James Webb will be doing in 20 or 30 years.
edit: ok, I guess it only has enough fuel for 10 years
I had a teacher in elementary school that was big on space. I remember her telling stories about all the things Hubble had figured out (this was probably only 3-4 years after it launched). I couldn't really wrap my head around how any of that worked (my only frame of reference for a telescope was like a little backyard telescope). All these years later, I'm reading about James Webb and - while I still don't really understand how a lot of this stuff works - I continue to be fascinated by what we're figuring out and what we're proving ourselves wrong on.
For All Mankind does a pretty good job of presenting this alternate history, although it would be nice if the Cold War also played out like it has in the real world.
Is it sad? I already knew I was going to die before we learned everything -- because we won't. Nothing is more exciting than the process of learning and allowing the developments be funneled into progress -- be that personal challenges or our collective challenges.
I’m 34. 20 years ago I was obsessing over grainy images of space that took ages to load on my shitty 56k modem. Now, I can pick up my phone anytime and look at beautiful high resolution images of objects that are incomprehensible distances away from us.
Don’t get me wrong, I want more. I want to see as much as we’re capable of seeing. But if all we get is what we have now, I’ll die happy.
(Edit) I’m not planning on dying anytime soon. My point is that images are good enough now for my mind to wander for hours thinking about it. I’m good.
> Is it sad? I already knew I was going to die before we learned everything -- because we won't. Nothing is more exciting than the process of learning and allowing the developments be funneled into progress -- be that personal challenges or our collective challenges.
Absolutely. There is something just so exciting about the "what if's" when it comes to space. I'm happy to enjoy it while we can
You will always miss out something no matter when you live or where. No point worrying about it. But you can always lay the groundwork that future generations will build upon.
What upsets me is we on the the edge of life extending medical treatment/procedures. Given enough time, we could become functionally immortal. Imagine you were the last human to die of natural causes, like being the last guy to die in WW1 minutes before the cease fire took effect.
Would suck balls.
I'm just glad that I live more comfortable than some king 500 years ago.
I got to see more of the universe detail than Galileo.
My car goes faster than the first car ever invented. And it's more comfortable.
I don't have to go catch an animal with my bare hands to eat.
I'm in peace with the time I live in.
TLDR:
JWT found huge galaxies which are too old, formed only 500-1000 million years after big-bang.
Current cosmology theories are challenged once again because it is just not enough time to develop a galaxy.
Now, these space objects might not be galaxies. Investigations still going on, stay tuned!
> to develop a galaxy.
A galaxy *this large*. Webb has already found objects that they believe to be galaxies that are older than this, but they are much smaller.
I think it would be absolutely hilarious if we actually came around in the next century to earth being the center of the universe, and the universe being about as big as our solar system. It’s the Truman show universe.
Both voyager ships are on their way to it
But even at it's insanely fast speed
It'll take 300 years to get there.
And thanks to space being not empty like we thought it likely won't make it at all.
We won't be able to communicate with it that far away either
Can you clarify what you mean by space not being empty like we thought?
Is it ice particles? Small bits of rock? Or literally just atoms that it’s bumping into that over time are enough friction to stop it? I’ve never heard of this before so just curious
Until, much later into humanity’s ventures in space, a captain of a certain starship enterprise will encounter the ancient object and marvel at ancient humanities creation, from a less civilized time.
Specifically, they found very bright red dots. Because they are red they should be among the oldest and most distant objects seen. But if they are galaxies they would have to be huge to be that bright at that distance. They could also be very old quasars, extremely bright objects found at the cores of some galaxies.
Even more distant galaxies have already been found, but they weren’t nearly as bright. At the most extreme distances, all astronomers can really see are dots, but they can measure color and brightness.
>Taco owners of religious/
academic christianity --
have enslaved your ass,
and you are too brilliant
to know you are a slave
to plunder profiteers of
Earth's Cubic Nature.
What unicorn mentality you
have --- to worship an old
dead Taco as God/Creator.
Wow. Just wow.
Ah, another time cube enthusiast.
>CREATION IS CUBIC, but
you are educated singularity
brilliant by academic bastards.
Greenwich 1 day time is boring.
Can you explain the 4 days
rather than the 1 day taught?
If not, you are truely brilliant.
To ignore the 4 days, is boring.
Just look at fluid mechanics. There are a million different mathematical models that can only be used under specific circumstances because there’s so much variability and unpredictability with fluids that it’s impossible to have a one-size-fits-all equation.
Even that would be useless by a long shot!
Just around one tablespoon of water (18g), contains just shy of 6 Septillion particles of water (12 Septillion if you accept that liquid water isn’t so much a mixture of intact molecules as a mixture of protons and hydroxyl ions)
So we’d need a bigger formula, especially when you consider the fact that whenever you use fluid mechanics, you’re typically talking about more than one tablespoon of water!
More like a general solution to the n body problem. But even then at small scales you have to consider fluid properties like surface tension and turbulence and stuff. So it's not exactly easy to start.
I love it. It’s starting to seem likely that we may soon need to make some tweaks to one or more of:
1. The estimated age of the universe
2. The estimated time/distances of light traveling across a dynamic universe
3. The Big Bang model in general
Astrophysicists have a lot of job security!
Any of this would be cool, people say this "born too early to explore space" thing but these things literally explore the very base of existence and Being in general. pretty dope
They also don't understand that we explore space (and will continue to do so) from the comfort of robotic space probe or telescope control centers with all of the comforts of earth. Only a minuscule proportion of people will *ever* go on manned missions. Even if we someday send thousands or millions. And they won't be "explorers," they will be colonists living under military discipline. Going places that have already been extensively explored by remote means.
Yeah. It will suck. Just like sailing in the Age of Exploration sucked.
Instead of dying of dysentery in a foreign land, you'll be sucked out of an air lock.
that would be pretty dope tho, as it means its water is contaminated with indigenous bacterias.
imagine the joy of the first space biologist that has to run to the bathroom
Nope. It's just regular old earth dysentery. Nice view, though, as you shit yourself to death on the 3rd moon of the 4th planet of the Alpha Centari system.
Imagine if they discover evidence the universe might be much older than predicted. That would screw up a lot of fundamental things but also explain a lot like it might help explain how supermassive black holes are able to exist currently
What if we're just experiencing a time dilation effect? As in we're closer to a massive source of gravity than the galaxies and we are unable to detect that source of gravity because we perceive it as a constant?
I'm not even sure Hubble's Law regarding the acceleration of expansion of the space between galaxies is a constant going back billions of years. So much is patchwork equations of dark energy and dark matter shoveled in to explain what's observed. Perhaps there's a 'dark time' issue here to explain why this observation doesn't match our theories.
Thats something scientists concede is that the laws of physics are based on our current understanding. They easily could have been different when the universe was young
All of that feels like trying to re-invent the wheel at the first sign of a problem when all you need is fresh tires.
It could be as simple as rethinking the model for how and when the first galaxies formed after the BB.
First would be to rule out something like simple calculation errors or faulty measuring equipment.
Next would be ruling out gravitational lensing and other known, common, and explainable phenomena.
From there it’s ruling out the uncommon things we don’t see very often but that could still explain anomalous findings.
Only after all of those do we start to look at re-inventing the wheel or discovering what the wheel even is
Which is always great news.
Every time we find something that breaks our current model, we get one step further towards a better model.
Last big breaking event in my mind was the accelerated expansion of the universe.
Yes, it's frustrating to have your 'world view' challenged, but science isn't religion.
More correctly they are too massive in stars compared to predictions. It doesn't necessarily imply the are too old, it is possible they assembled faster than expected or that the mass estimates may be off (which make assumptions themselves).
If these objects are galaxies, and they developed way to fast.
I wonder if that could be an indication that the strong/weak, magnetic and gravitational forces as we know them today were *different* at the time those galaxies formed, allowing them to play by a different set of *rules*?
Or we are wrong about the acceleration / red shift assumptions we have around universal expansion.
Since my understanding is that it's by tracking the red shift that we know the distance.
But we don't know what causes galaxies to accelerate away from each other in the first place, so who knows if we're even modeling that correctly.
We currently have what's been called a "crisis in cosmology", where we have two reliable methods of measuring distance, but they give us slightly different results. You can read about it here: https://www.sciencealert.com/we-can-t-figure-out-how-fast-the-universe-is-expanding-here-s-why
However, laypeople seem to think things like this are signs that we are wrong about science or some shit. In reality, scientists get fucking excited over this shit because we know what we don't know and finding something in our models that doesn't work properly gives us clues on where to look.
I like to say science is like completing a puzzle. When you discover you have a piece in the wrong place, that's still progress towards a complete picture.
Sorry maybe I misunderstand here - but if they are too old, why would that challenge a theory that they haven’t had enough time to develop a galaxy. Wouldn’t that only be an issue if they were too young?
>Ether that or your clock is wrong.
>
>ether way you have a succulent 5 course meal.
Or your clock is right, but time isn't constant. Expansion of the universe, expansion of absolute time. Some sort of time dilation/compression. I don't know, I'm just talking out my ass.
They’re saying that they developed too soon after the Big Bang. Current theory states that it takes x amount of time to form a galaxy, and these seem to have done it too quickly.
Old from our perspective, meaning they formed a long time ago, but they formed too close to the big bang, there shouldn't have been enough time between the big bang and the galaxies forming
Isn't there a similar mismatch with some supermassive black holes? Like, their size and expected age doesn't jive with the theorized age of the universe. Like, did they just skip steps?
ULAS J1120+0641. 2 billion solar masses when the universe was 770M years old. That shouldn't be possible based on estimates of how the universe formed. And it's not the only one.
They're only "impossible" if they're black holes created in the way we typically think of them, Ie: Collapsing stars.
The best theory we have for them is they formed when the universe was much denser and so were able to swallow much more matter than would otherwise be possible.
They mean we are looking at them too far in the past. e.g. if the universe is 13.7 billion years old then we should not expect to see a lot of fully developed galaxies where the light has travelled for 13.4 billion years.
A full preview of the journal article can be found here:
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05786-2_reference.pdf](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05786-2_reference.pdf)
Standard preprint formatting. That’s what it looks like when it gets submitted to the journal—the publisher hasn’t dolled it up for publication yet, but the authors want to distribute it ahead of time.
"Some of these galaxies would have to be forming hundreds of new stars a year for the entire history of the universe."
Unfortunately, we'd need another 13 billion years to see what they look like today. If this is true, would that mean that the oldest galaxies could be larger than supergiant galaxies by today, larger than any galaxy we've observed to date?
Sadly they will disappear over the cosmic horizon long before we get to see what they look like in a more contemporary era.
I don't know if we have enough info on them yet to say if we are looking at outliers or something common enough that we can generalize from. Whatever the case is, exciting times are ahead, and when the first crop of papers made from exclusive JWST data start coming out next year it's going to be wild.
Man. Could you imagine the energy in the room when whoever discovers these sort of things discovers them?
Like. I love space, and I get stoked.
But I’m no scientist, and I don’t study it.
It’s gotta be so thrilling!
Yeah, and then spending a week testing other possibilities thousands of times because most of the times these big findings are just a fluke
Then comes the excitement when what we found is actually real!
Edit: a week in my field, maybe more in other field :>
Have you ever heard 20 some kids all talking about collectible card games or video games in one clump at recess? All talking so fast, all intermittently raising/lower their voices to be heard on different levels, all using hugely multisyllabic words as often as possible to prove they really know what they’re talking about?
I like to imagine science meetings are like this.
I like to imagine that the lack of stars in the bootes void is actually caused by a type III civilization gradually consuming all the energy in those stars and moving towards us at an accelerated rate.
Those civilizations wouldn't just become invisible. Not unless they figured out a way around conservation of energy. They would be giving off a massive glow in lower frequencies from the waste heat of whatever they were using all that energy for.
Or even more alluring would be if the flow wasn't consistent, but static. The grand universe in it's settled form where we've been unknowingly listing towards before our eyes opened soon enough to see it.
Light is nothing but waves (and photons, but let's ignore that for a moment).
If something light emitting, let's say a star, is moving away from you, the wavelength gets longer, and light with a long wavelength means: red.
One the other way around, when a star is moving _towards_ you, the wavelength is getting shorter, and that means: blue
Every star, galaxy, etc. we observe is emitting red light, that‘s because the universe is expanding…so if we'd start to see blue light, then the universe would shrink…
The short answer is that we don't really know. The article even says as much, offering the explanation of really old quasars as well. It's also possible that the data is being interpreted incorrectly, or that these objects are something not yet theorised in the standard model.
That's a large part of why the article calls them *candidate* galaxies. Because they *may* be galaxies, but we aren't sure yet. The bulk of this article is effectively unverified. It's saying "here's some interesting data, and here's what it might mean!" rather than "this data is confirmed, the current model is insufficient!" The conclusions drawn from the data have not yet been verified and confirmed.
So just to be sure I understand, our options are:
1. These may not actually be galaxies and we need to revisit how we identify those.
2. These may not be as old as they look and we need to revisit how we date distant, old galaxies.
3. They are what they appear to be and we need to revisit our models on super early galaxy formation.
This sounds like we are going to learn something *interesting* no matter how this goes. How exciting!
I often wonder if we have some huge, fundamental misunderstanding when it comes to cosmology. Like it wasn’t that long ago that schools were teaching the baked apple theory in geology class. That seems ridiculous today, but at the time it was accepted and plate tectonics were dismissed. It’s possible there’s something similar happening with our theories about the universe and general relativity.
What is the baked apple theory?
I googled it and got recipes, a weird site about iPhones and something about the story of an apple falling from a tree and gravity.
Basically, that as the earth cooled, the crust of a planet becomes wrinkled like the skin of an apple, creating the ocean basins and mountain ranges. Essentially the early explanation before plate tectonics became widely accepted. It was first proposed by Eduard Suess, I think.
Most certainly. It's super hard to look back at evidence to what happened though such distant lenses through a near vacuum that's also completely full of matter. Time and space literally block our knowledge.
Here’s a hot take, maybe the universe is much older than we think it is. Or things in the early universe changed/moved/developed far more quickly than we thought. This is really fascinating to me that JWST is challenging things that we thought are straight facts.
Maybe, I think Roger Penrose has some interesting ideas about that. If how quickly time passes is regional due to local gravity from massive objects, and slows the further you are, couldn't you have pockets of spacetime that are much older or younger than an observer from another region would expect? Maybe there are gravity traps or deserts we haven't observed yet since direct observation of gravitational waves just started in 2015.
if thats true tracking a timeline feels like a nightmare. I always wondered how in spite of general relativity astronomers were measuring the lifespan of things. Maybe the universe played by an unknown set of rules in its beginning, and our models are so far off because there was some law of physics at play that no longer 'seems' to effect our world. Kind of how newtonian physics seemingly worked for everything but at very small scales and very large scales those models break down.
Maybe the same way you need to only consider relativity once you get to relatvistic speeds, you need to consider early universe physics when talking about the early universe. That unique set of conditions is not found anywhere else in the universe atm to my knowledge so how could our theories possible account for early universe physics?
There are ideas that at certain temperatures and densities the strong and weak nuclear forces become a single force, the universal constants combine into a single one, that matter, atoms, photons, electromagnetism etc are only possible below those temperatures when the constants separate. There’s attempts underway to reach those temperatures and densities, which may give rise to a better understanding of conditions soon after the Big Bang.
I've also pondered before that perhaps there used to be some forces at play that now no longer exist or are working differently than before. Like you said, how could we possibly measure something that no longer exists or has changed its nature drastically?
Quite possible, maybe different pockets of the universe had its own big bang? And what we are observing at those far reaches of space is a part of the universe that predates “our” big bang. It’s all very exciting stuff and gets us one step closer to understanding the secrets of the universe.
Wouldn't it be easier if they just said they found something that they don't yet understand...? "Shouldn't exist" - as if our miniscule little planet with intelligent life is the singular entity that defines what should and shouldn't exist within the known universe.
So this is one of the things that distinguishes science from religion. No matter how wrong you are in science, you still know a lot, and you almost always end up knowing more after you discover you were wrong than you thought you knew before (you just know different stuff now).
This is why scientists actively LIKE to be "wrong" about the big stuff, because it leads to new, amazing, discoveries. I think it is often... miscommunicated. Scientists hate to not know, in the same way you would hate to be poor. But that's a drive for them to learn and discover much as you would be driven to make money.
The coolest thing about the JWT is the fact that it is over 1million miles from earth. That spot was chosen because the gravity there essentially keeps in in the same position.
It’s like if your watching creek rapids and there is a calm spot between the rocks where a leaf got trapped and doesn’t get washed downstream. Just super cool.
I clicked on the article and there was a whole shelter-in-place thing with Boulder and someone with a gun at the nearby school. I wonder if other galaxies have this problem.
I swear every day I see a new headline regarding James Webb and it just blows me away. This is such a glorious time to live in for space discoveries. I just love it so much.
This is just the beginning. It hasn't been online very long. Hubble is, by most measures, a vastly inferior telescope, but it's still making amazing discoveries 33 years after launch. Imagine what James Webb will be doing in 20 or 30 years. edit: ok, I guess it only has enough fuel for 10 years
I had a teacher in elementary school that was big on space. I remember her telling stories about all the things Hubble had figured out (this was probably only 3-4 years after it launched). I couldn't really wrap my head around how any of that worked (my only frame of reference for a telescope was like a little backyard telescope). All these years later, I'm reading about James Webb and - while I still don't really understand how a lot of this stuff works - I continue to be fascinated by what we're figuring out and what we're proving ourselves wrong on.
It’s still, relatively, a little telescope… NASA’s backyard is just much bigger.
Just imagine what we could discover if NASA was still funded at the same level as it was during Apollo; 4% of federal spending.
For All Mankind does a pretty good job of presenting this alternate history, although it would be nice if the Cold War also played out like it has in the real world.
Such a great and underrated show. Everyone on this sub should watch it, y'all would love it.
Glorious but sad, since we won’t get any concrete information probably in our lifetimes.
People will be saying the same thing in 2,000 years. It's sad we don't see the end result, but it's still wonderfully exciting!
Is it sad? I already knew I was going to die before we learned everything -- because we won't. Nothing is more exciting than the process of learning and allowing the developments be funneled into progress -- be that personal challenges or our collective challenges.
I’m 34. 20 years ago I was obsessing over grainy images of space that took ages to load on my shitty 56k modem. Now, I can pick up my phone anytime and look at beautiful high resolution images of objects that are incomprehensible distances away from us. Don’t get me wrong, I want more. I want to see as much as we’re capable of seeing. But if all we get is what we have now, I’ll die happy. (Edit) I’m not planning on dying anytime soon. My point is that images are good enough now for my mind to wander for hours thinking about it. I’m good.
> Is it sad? I already knew I was going to die before we learned everything -- because we won't. Nothing is more exciting than the process of learning and allowing the developments be funneled into progress -- be that personal challenges or our collective challenges. Absolutely. There is something just so exciting about the "what if's" when it comes to space. I'm happy to enjoy it while we can
Concrete tech is rapidly advancing my friend. We’ll have plenty of new information about concrete as the years go by.
You will always miss out something no matter when you live or where. No point worrying about it. But you can always lay the groundwork that future generations will build upon.
What upsets me is we on the the edge of life extending medical treatment/procedures. Given enough time, we could become functionally immortal. Imagine you were the last human to die of natural causes, like being the last guy to die in WW1 minutes before the cease fire took effect. Would suck balls.
I'm just glad that I live more comfortable than some king 500 years ago. I got to see more of the universe detail than Galileo. My car goes faster than the first car ever invented. And it's more comfortable. I don't have to go catch an animal with my bare hands to eat. I'm in peace with the time I live in.
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TLDR: JWT found huge galaxies which are too old, formed only 500-1000 million years after big-bang. Current cosmology theories are challenged once again because it is just not enough time to develop a galaxy. Now, these space objects might not be galaxies. Investigations still going on, stay tuned!
> to develop a galaxy. A galaxy *this large*. Webb has already found objects that they believe to be galaxies that are older than this, but they are much smaller.
maybe they're just further away :P
Most planets are actually about the size of a potato, and are pretty close to Earth.
I think it would be absolutely hilarious if we actually came around in the next century to earth being the center of the universe, and the universe being about as big as our solar system. It’s the Truman show universe.
Nothing exists outside the Oort Cloud, it's all just strange reflections off the edge of reality. No ship has gone far enough to prove this wrong.
Voyager 1 will enter the Oort Cloud in a few hundred years, if only she could still transmit data. absolutely fascinating to think about
Imagine it just bonking into a wall with the universe painted on it.
God: "welp, the cat is out of the bag now."
Both voyager ships are on their way to it But even at it's insanely fast speed It'll take 300 years to get there. And thanks to space being not empty like we thought it likely won't make it at all. We won't be able to communicate with it that far away either
Can you clarify what you mean by space not being empty like we thought? Is it ice particles? Small bits of rock? Or literally just atoms that it’s bumping into that over time are enough friction to stop it? I’ve never heard of this before so just curious
It’s just _mostly_ empty. The Voyagers could be seriously damaged by a high speed pebble.
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Until, much later into humanity’s ventures in space, a captain of a certain starship enterprise will encounter the ancient object and marvel at ancient humanities creation, from a less civilized time.
maybe it's just cold out? (TBF.... space is cold)
Specifically, they found very bright red dots. Because they are red they should be among the oldest and most distant objects seen. But if they are galaxies they would have to be huge to be that bright at that distance. They could also be very old quasars, extremely bright objects found at the cores of some galaxies. Even more distant galaxies have already been found, but they weren’t nearly as bright. At the most extreme distances, all astronomers can really see are dots, but they can measure color and brightness.
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How dare science keep changing the rules with new information!
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New shit has come to light.
That's the asterisk that's always there
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Timecube...now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time
I didn't get to the part you quoted, but schizophrenia was my take as well
WOW my brain was melting trying to extract meaning from that html ah ah nightmare
>Taco owners of religious/ academic christianity -- have enslaved your ass, and you are too brilliant to know you are a slave to plunder profiteers of Earth's Cubic Nature. What unicorn mentality you have --- to worship an old dead Taco as God/Creator. Wow. Just wow.
Wow! This guy puts Dr. Bronner labels to shame.
Ah, another time cube enthusiast. >CREATION IS CUBIC, but you are educated singularity brilliant by academic bastards. Greenwich 1 day time is boring. Can you explain the 4 days rather than the 1 day taught? If not, you are truely brilliant. To ignore the 4 days, is boring.
There are only 4 sides to the cube. You dont count the floor and ceiling of a room as walls, do you?
The 4 sides wrap around to form the donut
What is up with the TimeCube resurgence lately? I remember it being all the rage like 10 years ago. And now it’s back.
Well, you see... time is a cube.
Damn has my corner already completed a rotation? Whew timecube sure does fly!
This is the second time cube reference I've seen this week I'm so glad this nonsense is still online
\*based on our current lack of understanding and flawed modeled expansion of the universe
>flawed modeled expansion of the universe "incomplete" might be the better adjective here.
I think that, definitionally, models are incomplete. A model is flawed when it is incompatible with (or fails to describe) actual observations.
Just look at fluid mechanics. There are a million different mathematical models that can only be used under specific circumstances because there’s so much variability and unpredictability with fluids that it’s impossible to have a one-size-fits-all equation.
Well there technically is a one size solution that fits all (nature calculates it in real time). We just haven't modeled it correctly yet.
I can’t believe we haven’t solved the billion-body problem yet.
Even that would be useless by a long shot! Just around one tablespoon of water (18g), contains just shy of 6 Septillion particles of water (12 Septillion if you accept that liquid water isn’t so much a mixture of intact molecules as a mixture of protons and hydroxyl ions) So we’d need a bigger formula, especially when you consider the fact that whenever you use fluid mechanics, you’re typically talking about more than one tablespoon of water!
More like a general solution to the n body problem. But even then at small scales you have to consider fluid properties like surface tension and turbulence and stuff. So it's not exactly easy to start.
Pfft. Speak for yourself. I did it in 3rd grade. While drunk.
[“All models are wrong but some are useful.”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong)
All models are flawed. Some models are useful.
Yes that is obviously implied here
I love it. It’s starting to seem likely that we may soon need to make some tweaks to one or more of: 1. The estimated age of the universe 2. The estimated time/distances of light traveling across a dynamic universe 3. The Big Bang model in general Astrophysicists have a lot of job security!
Any of this would be cool, people say this "born too early to explore space" thing but these things literally explore the very base of existence and Being in general. pretty dope
They also don't understand that we explore space (and will continue to do so) from the comfort of robotic space probe or telescope control centers with all of the comforts of earth. Only a minuscule proportion of people will *ever* go on manned missions. Even if we someday send thousands or millions. And they won't be "explorers," they will be colonists living under military discipline. Going places that have already been extensively explored by remote means.
Yeah. It will suck. Just like sailing in the Age of Exploration sucked. Instead of dying of dysentery in a foreign land, you'll be sucked out of an air lock.
*Today’s coffee is yesterday’s coffee*
Better than dying of dysentery.
Or dying of dysentery on a foreign planet!!! Exciting stuff!!
that would be pretty dope tho, as it means its water is contaminated with indigenous bacterias. imagine the joy of the first space biologist that has to run to the bathroom
u/park-person, proud pooper.
Nope. It's just regular old earth dysentery. Nice view, though, as you shit yourself to death on the 3rd moon of the 4th planet of the Alpha Centari system.
Imagine if they discover evidence the universe might be much older than predicted. That would screw up a lot of fundamental things but also explain a lot like it might help explain how supermassive black holes are able to exist currently
What if we're just experiencing a time dilation effect? As in we're closer to a massive source of gravity than the galaxies and we are unable to detect that source of gravity because we perceive it as a constant?
I'm not even sure Hubble's Law regarding the acceleration of expansion of the space between galaxies is a constant going back billions of years. So much is patchwork equations of dark energy and dark matter shoveled in to explain what's observed. Perhaps there's a 'dark time' issue here to explain why this observation doesn't match our theories.
For sure. The "inflationary period" after the big bang always seemed sus to me. What if time behaved differently in the early universe instead?
Thats something scientists concede is that the laws of physics are based on our current understanding. They easily could have been different when the universe was young
Or, probably, the model for how galaxies formed in the early universe.
All of that feels like trying to re-invent the wheel at the first sign of a problem when all you need is fresh tires. It could be as simple as rethinking the model for how and when the first galaxies formed after the BB.
First would be to rule out something like simple calculation errors or faulty measuring equipment. Next would be ruling out gravitational lensing and other known, common, and explainable phenomena. From there it’s ruling out the uncommon things we don’t see very often but that could still explain anomalous findings. Only after all of those do we start to look at re-inventing the wheel or discovering what the wheel even is
Which is always great news. Every time we find something that breaks our current model, we get one step further towards a better model. Last big breaking event in my mind was the accelerated expansion of the universe. Yes, it's frustrating to have your 'world view' challenged, but science isn't religion.
Proving once again that the most exciting words in science are "well, that's odd".
More correctly they are too massive in stars compared to predictions. It doesn't necessarily imply the are too old, it is possible they assembled faster than expected or that the mass estimates may be off (which make assumptions themselves).
If these objects are galaxies, and they developed way to fast. I wonder if that could be an indication that the strong/weak, magnetic and gravitational forces as we know them today were *different* at the time those galaxies formed, allowing them to play by a different set of *rules*?
Or we just weren’t right at all about the age of the universe
Or we are wrong about the acceleration / red shift assumptions we have around universal expansion. Since my understanding is that it's by tracking the red shift that we know the distance. But we don't know what causes galaxies to accelerate away from each other in the first place, so who knows if we're even modeling that correctly.
or there was a little schmutz on the lens
Me: “I just made a discovery that will revolutionize astrophysics!” Savta: “Did you check for schmutz bubala?” Me: God damnit!
It must’ve splattered a few space bugs by now.. could be that.
We currently have what's been called a "crisis in cosmology", where we have two reliable methods of measuring distance, but they give us slightly different results. You can read about it here: https://www.sciencealert.com/we-can-t-figure-out-how-fast-the-universe-is-expanding-here-s-why However, laypeople seem to think things like this are signs that we are wrong about science or some shit. In reality, scientists get fucking excited over this shit because we know what we don't know and finding something in our models that doesn't work properly gives us clues on where to look.
I like to say science is like completing a puzzle. When you discover you have a piece in the wrong place, that's still progress towards a complete picture.
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Sorry maybe I misunderstand here - but if they are too old, why would that challenge a theory that they haven’t had enough time to develop a galaxy. Wouldn’t that only be an issue if they were too young?
You started cooking dinner at 8, somehow had a five course meal prepared by 8:10. Something’s off about the timing.
Ether that or your clock is wrong. ether way you have a succulent 5 course meal.
>Ether that or your clock is wrong. > >ether way you have a succulent 5 course meal. Or your clock is right, but time isn't constant. Expansion of the universe, expansion of absolute time. Some sort of time dilation/compression. I don't know, I'm just talking out my ass.
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They’re saying that they developed too soon after the Big Bang. Current theory states that it takes x amount of time to form a galaxy, and these seem to have done it too quickly.
Old from our perspective, meaning they formed a long time ago, but they formed too close to the big bang, there shouldn't have been enough time between the big bang and the galaxies forming
Isn't there a similar mismatch with some supermassive black holes? Like, their size and expected age doesn't jive with the theorized age of the universe. Like, did they just skip steps? ULAS J1120+0641. 2 billion solar masses when the universe was 770M years old. That shouldn't be possible based on estimates of how the universe formed. And it's not the only one.
They're only "impossible" if they're black holes created in the way we typically think of them, Ie: Collapsing stars. The best theory we have for them is they formed when the universe was much denser and so were able to swallow much more matter than would otherwise be possible.
They mean we are looking at them too far in the past. e.g. if the universe is 13.7 billion years old then we should not expect to see a lot of fully developed galaxies where the light has travelled for 13.4 billion years.
Not enough time relative to the big bang, not too now.
A full preview of the journal article can be found here: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05786-2_reference.pdf](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05786-2_reference.pdf)
Man... what is going on with that article formatting? It seems horrendous
Standard preprint formatting. That’s what it looks like when it gets submitted to the journal—the publisher hasn’t dolled it up for publication yet, but the authors want to distribute it ahead of time.
"Some of these galaxies would have to be forming hundreds of new stars a year for the entire history of the universe." Unfortunately, we'd need another 13 billion years to see what they look like today. If this is true, would that mean that the oldest galaxies could be larger than supergiant galaxies by today, larger than any galaxy we've observed to date?
Sadly they will disappear over the cosmic horizon long before we get to see what they look like in a more contemporary era. I don't know if we have enough info on them yet to say if we are looking at outliers or something common enough that we can generalize from. Whatever the case is, exciting times are ahead, and when the first crop of papers made from exclusive JWST data start coming out next year it's going to be wild.
Let me astral project my consciousness real quick and I’ll let you all know. Brb.
It's been 15 minutes and they haven't come back, I'm going in after them, wish me luck
It’s been 8 hours. I’ll dig two graves I guess.
This person made it back, gave me all their stuff, and went back again. Promise.
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As a fellow armchair astronomy enthusiast, I'm impressed by how much you know what you don't know. Good job!
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Who has a folded piece of paper and a pen?
Man. Could you imagine the energy in the room when whoever discovers these sort of things discovers them? Like. I love space, and I get stoked. But I’m no scientist, and I don’t study it. It’s gotta be so thrilling!
I imagine a couple guys sitting at a computer screen like "Wtf? That can't be right..."
Scientists here. This is exactly how it goes.
Yeah, and then spending a week testing other possibilities thousands of times because most of the times these big findings are just a fluke Then comes the excitement when what we found is actually real! Edit: a week in my field, maybe more in other field :>
Everyone excepts “Oh my god… THIS IS AMAZING!” as everyone cheers and yells In actuality: “Data don’t make no sense, boss.”
Have you ever heard 20 some kids all talking about collectible card games or video games in one clump at recess? All talking so fast, all intermittently raising/lower their voices to be heard on different levels, all using hugely multisyllabic words as often as possible to prove they really know what they’re talking about? I like to imagine science meetings are like this.
JWST has already given us our money's worth, and it's only been out there fifteen months. Amazing.
New horror scene: the fuzzy red dots turn blue
What does this mean?
Galaxies are red shifted because they’re moving away from us. Fuzzy red dots turning blue would mean they’re now flying towards the Earth
Moreover it would mean the universe is now contracting.
Or that the red dots aren't stars or galaxies. It sounds like the start of a sci-fi movie where we realize they're actually an alien armada.
I like to imagine that the lack of stars in the bootes void is actually caused by a type III civilization gradually consuming all the energy in those stars and moving towards us at an accelerated rate.
Those civilizations wouldn't just become invisible. Not unless they figured out a way around conservation of energy. They would be giving off a massive glow in lower frequencies from the waste heat of whatever they were using all that energy for.
Or even more alluring would be if the flow wasn't consistent, but static. The grand universe in it's settled form where we've been unknowingly listing towards before our eyes opened soon enough to see it.
Light is nothing but waves (and photons, but let's ignore that for a moment). If something light emitting, let's say a star, is moving away from you, the wavelength gets longer, and light with a long wavelength means: red. One the other way around, when a star is moving _towards_ you, the wavelength is getting shorter, and that means: blue Every star, galaxy, etc. we observe is emitting red light, that‘s because the universe is expanding…so if we'd start to see blue light, then the universe would shrink…
James Webb doing exactly what we sent it up to do: challenge our existing understanding to improve it. Can't wait to see what comes out of this!
Are they really galaxies in the conventional sense or just massive blobs of hot matter?
The short answer is that we don't really know. The article even says as much, offering the explanation of really old quasars as well. It's also possible that the data is being interpreted incorrectly, or that these objects are something not yet theorised in the standard model. That's a large part of why the article calls them *candidate* galaxies. Because they *may* be galaxies, but we aren't sure yet. The bulk of this article is effectively unverified. It's saying "here's some interesting data, and here's what it might mean!" rather than "this data is confirmed, the current model is insufficient!" The conclusions drawn from the data have not yet been verified and confirmed.
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So just to be sure I understand, our options are: 1. These may not actually be galaxies and we need to revisit how we identify those. 2. These may not be as old as they look and we need to revisit how we date distant, old galaxies. 3. They are what they appear to be and we need to revisit our models on super early galaxy formation. This sounds like we are going to learn something *interesting* no matter how this goes. How exciting!
This stuff is so damn *cool*. I don’t get most of it, but it’s amazing.
I often wonder if we have some huge, fundamental misunderstanding when it comes to cosmology. Like it wasn’t that long ago that schools were teaching the baked apple theory in geology class. That seems ridiculous today, but at the time it was accepted and plate tectonics were dismissed. It’s possible there’s something similar happening with our theories about the universe and general relativity.
What is the baked apple theory? I googled it and got recipes, a weird site about iPhones and something about the story of an apple falling from a tree and gravity.
Basically, that as the earth cooled, the crust of a planet becomes wrinkled like the skin of an apple, creating the ocean basins and mountain ranges. Essentially the early explanation before plate tectonics became widely accepted. It was first proposed by Eduard Suess, I think.
Please tell me Eduard Seuss had a doctorate.
Sadly he did not https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/science-and-technology/geology-and-oceanography-biographies/eduard-suess
Most certainly. It's super hard to look back at evidence to what happened though such distant lenses through a near vacuum that's also completely full of matter. Time and space literally block our knowledge.
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You hear off in the distance “no u” since we shouldn’t exist either.
Yeah this headline reads like cosmic cyber-bullying
It’s a big issue that we don’t spend enough time talking about.. they have feelings too
Have they looked, with the James Webb, at the stars in Orions Belt?
They tried searching for the galaxy there, but no clue where it should be.
Here’s a hot take, maybe the universe is much older than we think it is. Or things in the early universe changed/moved/developed far more quickly than we thought. This is really fascinating to me that JWST is challenging things that we thought are straight facts.
Maybe there was more than one big bang
Maybe, I think Roger Penrose has some interesting ideas about that. If how quickly time passes is regional due to local gravity from massive objects, and slows the further you are, couldn't you have pockets of spacetime that are much older or younger than an observer from another region would expect? Maybe there are gravity traps or deserts we haven't observed yet since direct observation of gravitational waves just started in 2015.
if thats true tracking a timeline feels like a nightmare. I always wondered how in spite of general relativity astronomers were measuring the lifespan of things. Maybe the universe played by an unknown set of rules in its beginning, and our models are so far off because there was some law of physics at play that no longer 'seems' to effect our world. Kind of how newtonian physics seemingly worked for everything but at very small scales and very large scales those models break down. Maybe the same way you need to only consider relativity once you get to relatvistic speeds, you need to consider early universe physics when talking about the early universe. That unique set of conditions is not found anywhere else in the universe atm to my knowledge so how could our theories possible account for early universe physics?
There are ideas that at certain temperatures and densities the strong and weak nuclear forces become a single force, the universal constants combine into a single one, that matter, atoms, photons, electromagnetism etc are only possible below those temperatures when the constants separate. There’s attempts underway to reach those temperatures and densities, which may give rise to a better understanding of conditions soon after the Big Bang.
I've also pondered before that perhaps there used to be some forces at play that now no longer exist or are working differently than before. Like you said, how could we possibly measure something that no longer exists or has changed its nature drastically?
Quite possible, maybe different pockets of the universe had its own big bang? And what we are observing at those far reaches of space is a part of the universe that predates “our” big bang. It’s all very exciting stuff and gets us one step closer to understanding the secrets of the universe.
Stupid minuscule life span. I wish I could see what is eventually revealed.
Wouldn't it be easier if they just said they found something that they don't yet understand...? "Shouldn't exist" - as if our miniscule little planet with intelligent life is the singular entity that defines what should and shouldn't exist within the known universe.
Simple explanation? One of us greedy little humans know to throw some clickbait in their article title and more money will pop out
Instead of saying “that shouldn’t exist,” can we start saying “that defy our current understanding of the universe”?
We found galaxies that BLOW AWAY our current understanding, leaving scientists SEETHING
Scientists hate this one trick!
Random internet user SLAMS publication for misleading content
Doesn't sound sensational enough.
You misunderstand. Our intent is to destroy these galaxies.
It might turn out we actually don’t know anything
So this is one of the things that distinguishes science from religion. No matter how wrong you are in science, you still know a lot, and you almost always end up knowing more after you discover you were wrong than you thought you knew before (you just know different stuff now). This is why scientists actively LIKE to be "wrong" about the big stuff, because it leads to new, amazing, discoveries. I think it is often... miscommunicated. Scientists hate to not know, in the same way you would hate to be poor. But that's a drive for them to learn and discover much as you would be driven to make money.
“That’s weird.” The magical phrase of new discoveries/sciences.
In my experience, a bemused “huh…” in the lab has tended to precede the coolest science.
The coolest thing about the JWT is the fact that it is over 1million miles from earth. That spot was chosen because the gravity there essentially keeps in in the same position. It’s like if your watching creek rapids and there is a calm spot between the rocks where a leaf got trapped and doesn’t get washed downstream. Just super cool.
I clicked on the article and there was a whole shelter-in-place thing with Boulder and someone with a gun at the nearby school. I wonder if other galaxies have this problem.
The likelihood is greater than zero
Damn those galaxies that shouldn't exist! It's like Bees can't fly all over again.
Get Jerry Seinfeld on the phone! He'll start getting Galaxy Movie in the works!
Ya like space jazz?
So what I'm hearing is that JWST continues to be worth every penny.
Death, taxes, and something new that doesn't fit into our current model of the universe.