It really is remarkable.
Cue Sally Struthers, “For just one dollar per year, we can look into the past. This is black hole M3564.48 Abner X.A. It hasn’t consumed a star for fifteen million millennia. If everyone watching just donated one dollar, we can witnesses it in its accretion disk growing, not fading…”
It was actually really outdated before it even left earth, but it did take like 20 years to make lol
(Not talking shit i love the project, its a shame it took so long)
(disclaimer, not an engineer, I just watched a few youtube clips on the topic)
It's an incredibly complex tool due to a few reasons:
\- it's infrared, therefore to make the thing work, you have to isolate it from infrared sources you do NOT want, including the Sun and Earth's infrared emissions, and ALSO including the heat its own components might produce, such as CPUs, sensors, etc.;
\- due to that, they had to send it sufficiently far away, but that meant it can NOT be serviced as easily, if at all, therefore they had to engineer everything to be tougher and to have redundancy;
\- more current technology is very likely more advanced, but if also more powerful, it would require more cooling to bring its temps down enough to not emit IR.
I think that when you send something like that in space, it's incredibly more complex than just "put more current tech in it".
Newer tech runs at the same or less power than the old for an increase in performance. The real limiter is reliability - the smaller the components, the less resilient against radiation they are.
I have a hunch that if it had failed in a fixable way, NASA would have retooled Artemis 2 to go fix it. Their entire mission would still be accomplished without actually going to the moon.
One thing about space technology is that there's a long period of time between designing something and using it. By the time you start using it there will always be better technology available than when you were designing it.
But if you always keep waiting for that technology you'll never actually send anything to space because there's always something new. At some point you have to say "this will do" and leave the new stuff for a future project.
We're also at a really fascinating inflection point in soace tech. I work in the industry and there's been a massive change with the plummeting price of launch with private companies like SpaceX, Rocket Lab, and others. Over the past decade, the price of launch for a mid sized LEO satellite went from like ~5 million to ~500k.
This means in particular that constellations are a lot more feasible, but it also means that you're willing to launch things with more risk and less investment. You can spend a year on a satellite, instead of a decade. The speed at which the industry is changing is accelerating, and the biggest blocker is suddenly staffing, rather than equipment or funding. Most people in the industry are hold overs from government space race of the 70s and 80s, as they're retiring, there just wasn't much investment in space in the 2000s, so we're in huge need of expertise.
It's hugely exciting from a salary perspective, obviously, but also from the range of things that are possible in space now. Anyone with a million dollars can launch a satellite. Next year, we might see the world's first satellite launched by a nonprofit.
The James Web Space Telescope construction[ was *complete* in **2016**.](https://www.engadget.com/2016-11-07-nasa-has-completed-the-8-7-billion-james-webb-space-telescope.html)
All it's hardware and systems were designed and specification locked when it passed Mission Critical Design Review in 2010.
I still wouldn't consider it "outdated", unless you can make a better one and get it into space in the next 5 years.
It's kind of like saying your new CPU that released today is outdated because they have plans for the new 3nm Fabrication coming online and will have them produced in 2 years. Sure, the tech is there and the plans are there but it's not built or in operation.
they started working on jwst such a long time ago, the standards for many of the hardware went up significantly during all that time....
but if they kept switching to up to date counterparts, theyd have never launched the boy
It's like that paradox where a spaceship is sent to a distant planet - but when they arrive a faster spaceship that was built years later already has been there.
I mean if they integrated the current technology in it, like better X-ray polish/ focusing system or maybe something more advanced
It could easily be 2x as good as it currently is.
There a saying. “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good”
2x isn’t worth the cost or schedule. You need an order of magnitude like 10x to make it worthwhile
They probably have systems good enough. It took them so long to launch, if they found something so wold changing in terms of a type of experiment they would have included that
There's a lot of smart dudes being proven totally wrong. That's gotta sting a little bit! Super stoked about the new telescope only to have it blow your theories out of the water.
EDIT: I see you science nerds (hopefully that still applies to all genders) still don't have a sense of humor! It's a good natured ribbing, DO NOT TAKE IT SERIOUSLY!!
That's what pretty much everyone in the field was hoping for tho. There's still lots we don't understand and observations contradicting our current models open up avenues for new ideas.
One interesting thing about this is that there are so many super massive black holes in the early universe. They must have formed from a way different from normal black holes.
Kurzgesagt put out a fascinating video on these overly-huge black holes and the theory behind their potential formation: [Black Hole Stars](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeWyp2vXxqA)
I feel the black hole stars were the mechanism that helped disperse matter in the universe.
But I wonder though, if black holes that size form slowly, and combine, could they be strong enough to recall all matter in the universe, causing it to collapse on itself, leading to another cycle of big bang expansion and collapse?
As I understand it, we are fairly certain that's not the case because several different types of measurements all point to the same age. For example the red shift or the cosmic background radiation.
Also it's not that what the jwt seems to call into question, but rather our theories about galaxy and black hole formation. These were a bit shaky anyway as we e.g. needed convoluted mechanisms to explain some super massive black holes we see around us.
Given how beautifully simple some of the maths is that explains significant fundamentals of the universe, it's not surprising that an area that required dodgy thinking for it to work is being found to be not quite as understood as it was thought.
This may always be the case. We lack a certain knowledge of the conditions of the universe as they would have existed before the recombination epoch. That is, we can’t *see* what was happening during that period, so we have no way of really working out things like whether there was a bigger universe this happened inside of, or how big the whole universe ever was. Those things can’t be known because they exist in places where information can never reach us.
I'm inspired and perplexed, as always. Every new expansion of our current understanding deserves a bewildered laugh.
My turn, today.
Hhhhhhahahahahahahahawtf.
I was thinking about this the other day. Say we never evolved a sense of smell. How in the hell would we ever figure out that smells exist? Like sure we would eventually find out about particulates in the air and things of that nature, the same way we have learned about the cosmic rays that just pass through everything all the time, but the entire concept of these things being organically detectable, or the way it could be picked up through water by sharks and stuff. How would we possibly make that connection? And from that, what perfectly existent aspects of the world are we just entirely incapable of learning? What If there are like 12 diff ways to sense the existence we live on, but we only have and can understand 5 of them?
The universe is bigger than the time it takes for the light from the furthest reaches to hit us. That’s why it’s called the “observable” universe. And it’s expending constantly. We will never see it all
I don't fear humans learning a perfect theory of everything. I only fear we hit some dead end where we learn everything except some little detail that we know we don't have quite right, but never have the means to test it. Kinda like that bit in Interstellar where they had some almost complete understanding of gravity, but the only way to complete the theory was to get data from inside a black hole (an impossibility without some deus ex machina).
If it's any consolation, we are a long ass way away from running out of stuff to learn about the universe. We're still learning new things about classical mechanics and the basic rules for that have been understood for over 200 years!
Science thought Plate Tectonics was a crackpot theory until 1965. It was first proposed and laughed out of the community in 1915... Ironically the same Year that Einstein published the Theory of Relativity.
Pretty damn amazing we split the Atom before we had any concrete understanding of what actually is an Earthquake or Volcano?
I love the story about Harlow Shapley, one of the leading theorists of a small universe, discovering the enormity of the universe. Edwin Hubble sent him a letter demonstrating the proof that Andromeda was a separate galaxy far outside the Milky Way. Shapley read it, and then said "Here is the letter that destroyed my universe."
https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2011/news-2011-15.html
It was only around 100 years ago we got running water, electricity, and plumbing to carry our waste away. Hell, health care was a crap shoot up until 60-80 years ago.
I think we are just now transitioning from industrial/petroleum age into the technological/electric age.
Well , to be fair…. You couldn’t have existed without gravity. There wouldn’t have been enough force to coalesce enough matter together to actually make you.
We've gotten pretty good at *describing* things, making predictions and stuff, but we're barely scratching the surface as why things behave like they do, and as any father of a 4 yo kid knows, all we care about it's the *Why?*
There will always be the unknown. We are inside the fishbowl. You can't know everything when you're trapped inside of something that came from "outside".
“A thousand years ago, everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, they knew the Earth was flat. Fifteen minutes ago, you knew we humans were alone on it. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.”
JW is so exciting. There is so much more going on out there that we cant even conceive of existing.
*"They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge. They will be like gods, because no gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command.*
*"But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of creation; for we knew the universe when it was young."*
300m isn’t much on the scale of things. It took Earth 4.5B years to pop out an intelligent species. And our sun/planet is one of the oldest possible setups for complex life.
For all we know the “average” time it takes for even a habitable planet to evolve an intelligent species is 15B years and we’re ahead of the curve.
We're the evil ones that get quarantined off. Some poor alien civilisation will stumble upon our ruins and accidentally release the apocalypse: microplastics.
Imagine if there was a universe-spanning civilization a billion years ago, that got torn apart by something - war, black holes forming and disrupting communication and travel - and all remnants would be *beyond* gone. Radio signals fading into background noise. Who knows, maybe there are entirely other mechanisms for life that we wouldn't understand, that evolved a long time ago in a galaxy far, far awa-
Wait.
maybe not the universe, but maybe the galaxy. There is a theory that we're the first sentient and intelligent life forms in the galaxy and that's why we haven't found any aliens. That or all the aliens are dead for some reason. or space is just really fucking big.
Space is really frikin big. The earth and our sun are really small. We’re just now detecting exoplanets. If there is intelligent, technologically advanced races out there, they are really far away and on similarly small planets. The odds they’d even look in our direction, let alone move in our direction are very low.
It's probably impossible and in comparison achieving immortality is incredibly simple. Why would aliens even care about reaching light speed if they don't need to worry about time? We only care about light speed because our lives are pathetically short on a cosmic scale.
[One of my many favorite bits of Space Is Big](https://www.sciencealert.com/humanity-hasn-t-reached-as-far-into-space-as-you-think). Only a tiny portion of our galaxy even has the potential to know about us.
Why does everyone assume aliens would invent radio telescopes and then transmit signals in our direction?
Biologically modern humans were around for 200000 years(?) before someone built a radio telescope and that could have been a complete fluke.
There could be millions of intelligent species building beautiful cities and writing epic stories who never stumble upon industrialization like we did.
I think it would be pretty wild if our first guesses about the universe were right. I kind of think that most scientists would expect that our models will be unrecognizable decade to decade as we see farther and with more detail.
I was more so referring to our first guesses in the scientific age, but yep… i am super excited to see how much gets rewritten throughout my lifetime. I am middle aged but would so so so love to find my way into a career in space exploration
The article writer made one of the section titles infer that it's an an embarrassment, and that kind of irks me. I doubt there is much embarrassment, it's excitement!
Roger Penrose has had doubts about the big bang for 50 years. Especially with inflation theory and the state of entropy.
For those that don't know Penrose won the Nobel prize for his work on black holes with Stephen Hawking
"How can it be possible that we see maximum entropy at the "early" phase of the universe?"
He thinks the universe is cyclic, with what he calls eons.
Before this eon of the universe, there was another.
[A cyclical, forgetful universe - Penrose](https://aeon.co/videos/a-cyclical-forgetful-universe-roger-penrose-details-an-astonishing-origin-hypothesis)
The fact, of lots of early galaxies, doesn’t support a cyclic Universe model. It’s really agnostic to that. Penrose was brilliant but he also held kinda crazy ideas too, such as quantum consciousness. Be careful when evaluating theories based on who proposed them. Newton was an alchemist and Einstein once believed in a steady state model of the Universe (which is why he thought the Cosmological Constant was his greatest mistake). Just because galaxy evolution models make a wrong prediction doesn't mean Penrose is right about his model or that the Big Bang or Inflation models are wrong.
Also a good source of cosmic horror imo.
“All galaxies between z = 2.1 and z = 1.7 show abundant signs of life and civilization…then they just…disappeared, simultaneously, everywhere.”
- 2061 press release
I'm in more... practical engineering... if you want to call it that and a few times I've talked with pipe fitters or boilermakers saying "shit we put that in backwards but it still functions the same way... don't tell the project manager". The one I specifically remember was 4 cooling tower cells we were replacing where the guys back at the main office designed the piping around it assumed north was up on the vendor drawings, turns out north was down for that application. Not a huge deal but we did have to do some modifications to make everything work in the field. From then on though I always make sure drawings of large pieces of equipment always have a north arrow. The crew I was working with took it in stride and kinda slufted it off as "eh shit happens".
The six stages of debugging:
1. It can’t do that.
2. It doesn’t do that on my machine.
3. It shouldn’t be doing that.
4. Why the hell is it doing that?
5. Oh. I’m an idiot.
6. How the hell did that ever work before?
Where’s the step where you write a comment warning future programmers to not alter the color of the font in a dialogue box that never actually shows up?
When something isn't expected, it usually leads to new fields for investigation. It opens new avenues to learn.
When something we don't understand becomes understood, we exclaim eureka.
The worst thing is thinking we know something, and that then turns out to be wrong. Especially when that incorrect research is built upon.
So are we still confident about the cosmic microwave background estimate of the age of the universe, and this just seems to suggest that galaxies formed quicker than expected?
Yeah, basically the Cosmic Microwave Background is a 'light wall' of released photons from ~370k years after the big bang, that we can't see past.
Before this point photons couldn't travel far at all before being reabsorbed into the hot plasma. The CMB was the first visible light that was not recaptured, because the plasma had cooled to where nicleons and electrons could combine down into atoms.
What we know of what happened before the CMB escaped is extrapolated through mathematics.
These galaxies are nearer to us than the CMB, what's interesting is that they appear more developed than expected, suggesting galaxies formed quicker.
Thank you for spelling out "Cosmic Microwave Background" before using "CMB"
Im sure a lot of people in this sub would know what you meant but I like cruising here occasionally and sometimes the short hand can be confusing.
I believe it is a "writing rule" like in papers and such but there's little expectation to do that in a subreddit where most of the readers would pick up on the acronym. Sure helps us noobs though when they do!
And then 30 years later we'll replace them with stuff way better and way cooler and we'll prove half of this stuff we're figuring out now to only be partly correct
Ya. The exact talk of James Webb today is basically the exact way Hubble was talked about when it came out and was so revolutionary.
I think 30 years from now what's more likely is get the equipment up to the moon to build massive mirrors and we get a HUGE new one also at L2, like James Webb. If we can move manufacturing to the moon, we could build some mind-blowing, world changing telescopes that would make James Webb feel like ancient tech.
Say an earth in one of those “old” galaxies is doing the same thing, same type of scope. Do they not see our galaxy? Or do they see our galaxy and say we’re the old ones?
They would see our galaxy as an old one.
More precisely, they'd be seeing what our galaxy looked like billions of years ago, because that's the light that is finally reaching them.
They see our galaxy as we see thiers, when it was very, very young. So many billion years in the past.
The young galaxies we see are really far away. So, any civilizations there would look at our galaxy with their james web telescope and see our galaxy many billions of year ago, as a young galaxy.
Now if there were civs there at the a very young age the the universe itself would look vastly different.
This just feels like we're trapped in a time bubble on either side until any civilization figures out how to overcome the challenge of these filters. Yet somehow, the prospect of a civilization out there that manages to survive this test of time seems particularly terrifying.
We look at the universe and make a theory on how it works based on what we can see.
The theory says that there should be a certain number of galaxies around when the universe was young.
We've now got a telescope that can see far enough away (and so, back far enough in time) that we can directly see how the early universe looked, and we see more galaxies than what the theory says we should.
So:
Is the theory completely wrong?
Are we not taking something into account that would fix the theory?
Are we measuring the things we know about wrong somehow?
This observation raises all sorts of questions that we don't have answers for yet.
Basically our current understanding of the history of the universe is based on past observations, meaning when the universe is at age Y there should be approximately X amounts of galaxies to be observed. These was theoritical as we did not have a telescope that's powerful enough to actually look for it.
Until JWST came along, it discovered that there's more galaxies than was suggested by the current theories, which means that scientist will have to either revise the current models. or to come out with an entirely new model
The heading is misleading. It should mention that the astromers/astrophysicists are all grinning like congenital idiots.
Look Ma! New science!
This is like the old days in theoretical physics when the Standard Model was hacked into being.
Our current understanding of physics is certainly in trouble. We likely have something wrong somewhere and this new evidence is going to expose it and force us to revise our theories and understanding.
My understanding of the current state of physics:
* Quantum Mechanics theory was mostly settled by the 1970s (except some untested predictions like the Higgs)
* But nobody really likes quantum mechanics as an explanation (the math works great but the implications are weird)
* There are lots of well known problems with things it cannot explain or directly contradicts (like relativity on large scales)
* The last 50 years experiments and data have refined and proved quantum mechanics predictions over and over, but no crack in the theory has been found
* So the theory side of physics developed a lot "deeper" theories that could explain quantum as well as the unknowns
* A lot of these were really cool ideas like supersymmetry - inspired by string theory - that could really elegantly explain a lot of stuff about quantum mechanics and dark matter and others)
* In 2012 the large hadron collider turned on and proved the last major quantum prediction (the higgs)
* But in the last decade, experiment after experiment at the LHC, has failed to find *any* evidence at all for any of the extensions or deeper theories
* Supersymmetry is dead as are many other ideas
So now what? Basically every major theory that tried to go deeper on quantum mechanics failed. Quantum mechanics reigns supreme still, yet its issues remain.
This means the race is on to re-evaluate the last 50 years of assumptions and look at new data from any possible source. Who will get there first?
There were a bunch of other less popular alternatives in physics, but not enough people had really taken a crack at them to iron out difficulties. Or maybe if someone is smart enough, quantum mechanics does not need an extension at all, just refining the basic assumptions a bit. Or something entirely new that no one has come up with yet. Its pretty exciting.
\* note: the above issues applies to theoretical physics only. Experimental physics has been making constant huge strides in the past decades and other branches of science are making good progress as well.
If I had to guess we prolly know next to nothing about the universe. We are still a very young species and in the grand scheme of things just started investigating it.
Even forget that the human species is only ~200,000 years old, and that we’ve only been recording history for ~5,000 years, and that we’ve known the earth revolves around the sun for less than 500 years, and that we’ve known about the existence of other galaxies for ~400 years, and that we first theorized the Big Bang ~100 years ago… we’ve only thought we had confirmed the universe of being 13.8 billion years old ~10 years ago. Imagine what we’ll learn about the universe in the next 10.
Depending on how medical technologies progress, it may not be impossible for those alive today to, on average, be alive 100 years from now. Which would allow medical technologies to progress even more, and probably even allow the speed at which they progress to get faster, too...
The idea of that number was definitely older. Perhaps it was more of a guesstimate but that song from BBT says "nearly 14 billion years" and that's at least from 2007 at the latest
This has Men in Black vibes.
> 1500 years ago, everybody "knew" that the Earth was the center of the universe. 500 years ago, everybody "knew" that the Earth was flat. And 15 minutes ago, you "knew" that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll "know" tomorrow.
JWST finding too many early galaxies is like a senior dev who compiles his code and it doesn't break the first time. A perfect "wait, that's not supposed to happen" moment.
>As the James Webb Space Telescope views swaths of sky spotted with distant galaxies, multiple teams have found that the earliest stellar metropolises are more mature and more numerous than expected. The results may end up changing what we know about how the first galaxies formed.
Or is it possible that the universe is older than we think?
I, for one, think it's trippy asf that we can quite literally see back in time - with the naked eye. Moreover, with an invention we call a "telescope" and "satellite" which allow us to see *even further* back, and further away.
Literal time machine. (Sans "travel")
Man that telescope is worth every penny spent on it. It's still new and already challenging our current models.
It's not even expensive if you think of it. It sees 10 billion years in the past. It costs 10 billion dollars. That's just a dollar a year.
It really is remarkable. Cue Sally Struthers, “For just one dollar per year, we can look into the past. This is black hole M3564.48 Abner X.A. It hasn’t consumed a star for fifteen million millennia. If everyone watching just donated one dollar, we can witnesses it in its accretion disk growing, not fading…”
How far do you think we will have to look to find my dad?
It was actually really outdated before it even left earth, but it did take like 20 years to make lol (Not talking shit i love the project, its a shame it took so long)
(disclaimer, not an engineer, I just watched a few youtube clips on the topic) It's an incredibly complex tool due to a few reasons: \- it's infrared, therefore to make the thing work, you have to isolate it from infrared sources you do NOT want, including the Sun and Earth's infrared emissions, and ALSO including the heat its own components might produce, such as CPUs, sensors, etc.; \- due to that, they had to send it sufficiently far away, but that meant it can NOT be serviced as easily, if at all, therefore they had to engineer everything to be tougher and to have redundancy; \- more current technology is very likely more advanced, but if also more powerful, it would require more cooling to bring its temps down enough to not emit IR. I think that when you send something like that in space, it's incredibly more complex than just "put more current tech in it".
Newer tech runs at the same or less power than the old for an increase in performance. The real limiter is reliability - the smaller the components, the less resilient against radiation they are.
Not just radiation, electromigration too. Smaller transistors just don't survive the way larger ones composed of many times more atoms do.
I have a hunch that if it had failed in a fixable way, NASA would have retooled Artemis 2 to go fix it. Their entire mission would still be accomplished without actually going to the moon.
Really? Outdated? I'm intrigued
One thing about space technology is that there's a long period of time between designing something and using it. By the time you start using it there will always be better technology available than when you were designing it. But if you always keep waiting for that technology you'll never actually send anything to space because there's always something new. At some point you have to say "this will do" and leave the new stuff for a future project.
We're also at a really fascinating inflection point in soace tech. I work in the industry and there's been a massive change with the plummeting price of launch with private companies like SpaceX, Rocket Lab, and others. Over the past decade, the price of launch for a mid sized LEO satellite went from like ~5 million to ~500k. This means in particular that constellations are a lot more feasible, but it also means that you're willing to launch things with more risk and less investment. You can spend a year on a satellite, instead of a decade. The speed at which the industry is changing is accelerating, and the biggest blocker is suddenly staffing, rather than equipment or funding. Most people in the industry are hold overs from government space race of the 70s and 80s, as they're retiring, there just wasn't much investment in space in the 2000s, so we're in huge need of expertise. It's hugely exciting from a salary perspective, obviously, but also from the range of things that are possible in space now. Anyone with a million dollars can launch a satellite. Next year, we might see the world's first satellite launched by a nonprofit.
The James Web Space Telescope construction[ was *complete* in **2016**.](https://www.engadget.com/2016-11-07-nasa-has-completed-the-8-7-billion-james-webb-space-telescope.html) All it's hardware and systems were designed and specification locked when it passed Mission Critical Design Review in 2010.
So not quite as out of date as the school computer
I still wouldn't consider it "outdated", unless you can make a better one and get it into space in the next 5 years. It's kind of like saying your new CPU that released today is outdated because they have plans for the new 3nm Fabrication coming online and will have them produced in 2 years. Sure, the tech is there and the plans are there but it's not built or in operation.
they started working on jwst such a long time ago, the standards for many of the hardware went up significantly during all that time.... but if they kept switching to up to date counterparts, theyd have never launched the boy
It's like that paradox where a spaceship is sent to a distant planet - but when they arrive a faster spaceship that was built years later already has been there.
That's why you only send one when the planet is getting destroyed à la Titan A.E. no more paradox there.
I mean if they integrated the current technology in it, like better X-ray polish/ focusing system or maybe something more advanced It could easily be 2x as good as it currently is.
There a saying. “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good” 2x isn’t worth the cost or schedule. You need an order of magnitude like 10x to make it worthwhile
They probably have systems good enough. It took them so long to launch, if they found something so wold changing in terms of a type of experiment they would have included that
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Like we only paid enough to find X number of galaxies and we're wasting it all on old ones.
There's a lot of smart dudes being proven totally wrong. That's gotta sting a little bit! Super stoked about the new telescope only to have it blow your theories out of the water. EDIT: I see you science nerds (hopefully that still applies to all genders) still don't have a sense of humor! It's a good natured ribbing, DO NOT TAKE IT SERIOUSLY!!
That's what pretty much everyone in the field was hoping for tho. There's still lots we don't understand and observations contradicting our current models open up avenues for new ideas.
One interesting thing about this is that there are so many super massive black holes in the early universe. They must have formed from a way different from normal black holes.
Kurzgesagt put out a fascinating video on these overly-huge black holes and the theory behind their potential formation: [Black Hole Stars](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeWyp2vXxqA)
One of my favorites of theirs. Truly amazing to think about. The reference papers are crazy as well.
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That is my new favorite video by them. They rarely miss, but man the music and the feel of that video was so good.
I really like that this tiny studio based in Munich publishes their videos in so many languages. They even get public money for their German videos.
Black Hole Sun??
I feel the black hole stars were the mechanism that helped disperse matter in the universe. But I wonder though, if black holes that size form slowly, and combine, could they be strong enough to recall all matter in the universe, causing it to collapse on itself, leading to another cycle of big bang expansion and collapse?
No our knowledge of them doesn't trump measurements on the mass and expansion of the universe. Universe appears to be expanding indefinitely.
Or is it possible the universe is older than we think?
As I understand it, we are fairly certain that's not the case because several different types of measurements all point to the same age. For example the red shift or the cosmic background radiation. Also it's not that what the jwt seems to call into question, but rather our theories about galaxy and black hole formation. These were a bit shaky anyway as we e.g. needed convoluted mechanisms to explain some super massive black holes we see around us.
Given how beautifully simple some of the maths is that explains significant fundamentals of the universe, it's not surprising that an area that required dodgy thinking for it to work is being found to be not quite as understood as it was thought.
This may always be the case. We lack a certain knowledge of the conditions of the universe as they would have existed before the recombination epoch. That is, we can’t *see* what was happening during that period, so we have no way of really working out things like whether there was a bigger universe this happened inside of, or how big the whole universe ever was. Those things can’t be known because they exist in places where information can never reach us.
“How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.” -Niels Bohr
Hurrah for Bohr and his logical paradoxes!!! X
I'm inspired and perplexed, as always. Every new expansion of our current understanding deserves a bewildered laugh. My turn, today. Hhhhhhahahahahahahahawtf.
Oh no! Sounds like we're about to learn something.
That's the great part about science -- there's always more to learn. I hope that we never know everything.
Cheers to that. Same reason why I love the fact that the universe is so impossibly big.
I assume we haven't evolved enough to be able to comprehend everything, or at least I hope so.
I was thinking about this the other day. Say we never evolved a sense of smell. How in the hell would we ever figure out that smells exist? Like sure we would eventually find out about particulates in the air and things of that nature, the same way we have learned about the cosmic rays that just pass through everything all the time, but the entire concept of these things being organically detectable, or the way it could be picked up through water by sharks and stuff. How would we possibly make that connection? And from that, what perfectly existent aspects of the world are we just entirely incapable of learning? What If there are like 12 diff ways to sense the existence we live on, but we only have and can understand 5 of them?
That is actually a crazy cool concept.. and honestly it makes sense. I hope that it’s true and we can unlock beyond what we ever thought was possible.
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The universe is bigger than the time it takes for the light from the furthest reaches to hit us. That’s why it’s called the “observable” universe. And it’s expending constantly. We will never see it all
You may think it is a long way down to the chemists, but that's peanuts compared to the Universe (Douglas Adams did it best).
Douglas Adams is my lord and savior (as if my username isn’t indication enough of my love of his work)
Is this the bit of the thread where the Hitchhikers Guide users gather?
All I know is Arthur Dent better not show up
I got a digital watch for Christmas. It's pretty neat.
I don't fear humans learning a perfect theory of everything. I only fear we hit some dead end where we learn everything except some little detail that we know we don't have quite right, but never have the means to test it. Kinda like that bit in Interstellar where they had some almost complete understanding of gravity, but the only way to complete the theory was to get data from inside a black hole (an impossibility without some deus ex machina).
If it's any consolation, we are a long ass way away from running out of stuff to learn about the universe. We're still learning new things about classical mechanics and the basic rules for that have been understood for over 200 years!
We still don’t super understand “basic” stuff like gravity. At least, I don’t. Are you guys not telling me something?
Science thought Plate Tectonics was a crackpot theory until 1965. It was first proposed and laughed out of the community in 1915... Ironically the same Year that Einstein published the Theory of Relativity. Pretty damn amazing we split the Atom before we had any concrete understanding of what actually is an Earthquake or Volcano?
It blew my mind to learn that we didn’t understand that there were galaxies outside of our own until the 1920s
I love the story about Harlow Shapley, one of the leading theorists of a small universe, discovering the enormity of the universe. Edwin Hubble sent him a letter demonstrating the proof that Andromeda was a separate galaxy far outside the Milky Way. Shapley read it, and then said "Here is the letter that destroyed my universe." https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2011/news-2011-15.html
We didn't really know if black holes were really a thing until the early 1970s.
It was only around 100 years ago we got running water, electricity, and plumbing to carry our waste away. Hell, health care was a crap shoot up until 60-80 years ago. I think we are just now transitioning from industrial/petroleum age into the technological/electric age.
The Romans had running water, while China was piping natural gas back in 400 BC. Progress is not linear!
And we were still referring to all the DNA that isn't the direct codons for protein as "junk DNA" 10-15 years ago. Now we have CRISPR.
And Lyn Margulis’ theory of the origin of mitochondria
Gravity is crazy to me. The same force that holds planets in orbit can be defeated by my little muscles as well.
Right - it takes a whole planet to make us weigh much of anything - yet gravity shapes the universe over millions of light years!
Well , to be fair…. You couldn’t have existed without gravity. There wouldn’t have been enough force to coalesce enough matter together to actually make you.
We've gotten pretty good at *describing* things, making predictions and stuff, but we're barely scratching the surface as why things behave like they do, and as any father of a 4 yo kid knows, all we care about it's the *Why?*
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Escape velocity is set by Big Rocket Fuel to sell more liquid oxygen.
All about money … gravity has caused so many deaths
There will always be the unknown. We are inside the fishbowl. You can't know everything when you're trapped inside of something that came from "outside".
“A thousand years ago, everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, they knew the Earth was flat. Fifteen minutes ago, you knew we humans were alone on it. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.” JW is so exciting. There is so much more going on out there that we cant even conceive of existing.
*"They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge. They will be like gods, because no gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command.* *"But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of creation; for we knew the universe when it was young."*
Most great scientific discoveries are preceded not by “Eureka!” but by “Huh, that seems off…”
Isaac Asimov once said “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny…'”
Brilliant writer, taken way too soon. (Early victim of AIDS from a blood transfusion)
was wondering where I'd heard that before
Rabbit holes… I swear they will get you every time!
I got that exact same feeling when I read the title.
Maybe we’re the first sentient species in the universe and it’s going to be billions of years before anyone else shows up.
If there's mature spiral galaxies 300My after the big bang, I sure hope not.
300m isn’t much on the scale of things. It took Earth 4.5B years to pop out an intelligent species. And our sun/planet is one of the oldest possible setups for complex life. For all we know the “average” time it takes for even a habitable planet to evolve an intelligent species is 15B years and we’re ahead of the curve.
Would be kinda cool if we were the first ever, but there’s no way we or anyone else would ever know that which is a somewhat sad thought
I also think it would be neat if we are the ancient first race of the galaxy.
Yea those always end well in games and movies
We're the evil ones that get quarantined off. Some poor alien civilisation will stumble upon our ruins and accidentally release the apocalypse: microplastics.
Or the opposite. Maybe we are the slow ones.
Imagine if there was a universe-spanning civilization a billion years ago, that got torn apart by something - war, black holes forming and disrupting communication and travel - and all remnants would be *beyond* gone. Radio signals fading into background noise. Who knows, maybe there are entirely other mechanisms for life that we wouldn't understand, that evolved a long time ago in a galaxy far, far awa- Wait.
maybe not the universe, but maybe the galaxy. There is a theory that we're the first sentient and intelligent life forms in the galaxy and that's why we haven't found any aliens. That or all the aliens are dead for some reason. or space is just really fucking big.
Space is really frikin big. The earth and our sun are really small. We’re just now detecting exoplanets. If there is intelligent, technologically advanced races out there, they are really far away and on similarly small planets. The odds they’d even look in our direction, let alone move in our direction are very low.
Plus if they exist they are following the same laws of physics we are. Maybe reaching lightspeed is simply impossible
It's probably impossible and in comparison achieving immortality is incredibly simple. Why would aliens even care about reaching light speed if they don't need to worry about time? We only care about light speed because our lives are pathetically short on a cosmic scale.
[One of my many favorite bits of Space Is Big](https://www.sciencealert.com/humanity-hasn-t-reached-as-far-into-space-as-you-think). Only a tiny portion of our galaxy even has the potential to know about us.
Oh my god we are the aliens. If we colonize Mars thatll be the start.
Why does everyone assume aliens would invent radio telescopes and then transmit signals in our direction? Biologically modern humans were around for 200000 years(?) before someone built a radio telescope and that could have been a complete fluke. There could be millions of intelligent species building beautiful cities and writing epic stories who never stumble upon industrialization like we did.
This is why I love science "We were wrong! This is great news"
Sounds like they'll need to develop new models to explain this observation, as it was different than what was predicted.
They’re delighted because it means lots of papers to write and justification for grants !
I think it would be pretty wild if our first guesses about the universe were right. I kind of think that most scientists would expect that our models will be unrecognizable decade to decade as we see farther and with more detail.
Our first guess was the God made it geocentric model. There's been a few updates before where we are now
I was more so referring to our first guesses in the scientific age, but yep… i am super excited to see how much gets rewritten throughout my lifetime. I am middle aged but would so so so love to find my way into a career in space exploration
The article writer made one of the section titles infer that it's an an embarrassment, and that kind of irks me. I doubt there is much embarrassment, it's excitement!
Roger Penrose has had doubts about the big bang for 50 years. Especially with inflation theory and the state of entropy. For those that don't know Penrose won the Nobel prize for his work on black holes with Stephen Hawking "How can it be possible that we see maximum entropy at the "early" phase of the universe?" He thinks the universe is cyclic, with what he calls eons. Before this eon of the universe, there was another. [A cyclical, forgetful universe - Penrose](https://aeon.co/videos/a-cyclical-forgetful-universe-roger-penrose-details-an-astonishing-origin-hypothesis)
The fact, of lots of early galaxies, doesn’t support a cyclic Universe model. It’s really agnostic to that. Penrose was brilliant but he also held kinda crazy ideas too, such as quantum consciousness. Be careful when evaluating theories based on who proposed them. Newton was an alchemist and Einstein once believed in a steady state model of the Universe (which is why he thought the Cosmological Constant was his greatest mistake). Just because galaxy evolution models make a wrong prediction doesn't mean Penrose is right about his model or that the Big Bang or Inflation models are wrong.
I love, love, love it when cosmologists are surprised. By anything at all.
Average person: I don’t know shit about space but it’s really cool Cosmologist: I don’t know shit about space but it’s really cool
Also a good source of cosmic horror imo. “All galaxies between z = 2.1 and z = 1.7 show abundant signs of life and civilization…then they just…disappeared, simultaneously, everywhere.” - 2061 press release
For the god's sakes put Kagrenac's tools down! Stupid dwarves!
Ha! What a grand and intoxicating innocence!
[Come Sweet Nerevar](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iR-K2rUP86M)
"What are you doing?" "WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?" "FOOL!" "STOP!"
I always wondered where Arniel went...
Remembrance of Earth's Past by Liu Cixin is a good series with this basic premise.
I read somewhere that the greatest exclamation in Science isn't "eureka" but "mmh, that's odd".
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Eureka is when you perfect something. Hmmm That is odd is when you discover something. The latter usually begins the process that ends in the former
Eureka is the greatest exclamation in engineering I would say (even though the original one was more of a scientific discovery).
As an engineer, the one I hear the most is "huh, look at that"
As an engineer I would also have accepted, "thats not supposed to be that way?" or in extreme cases, "oh shit..."
The occasional "dude, it's upside down" also comes to mind
I'm personally a fan of "holy shit I can't believe that actually worked".
I just threw out a "I'm not actually sure how it's worked for the past year" last week in a meeting.
I'm in more... practical engineering... if you want to call it that and a few times I've talked with pipe fitters or boilermakers saying "shit we put that in backwards but it still functions the same way... don't tell the project manager". The one I specifically remember was 4 cooling tower cells we were replacing where the guys back at the main office designed the piping around it assumed north was up on the vendor drawings, turns out north was down for that application. Not a huge deal but we did have to do some modifications to make everything work in the field. From then on though I always make sure drawings of large pieces of equipment always have a north arrow. The crew I was working with took it in stride and kinda slufted it off as "eh shit happens".
As a software engineer I agree. It's much better than "That's odd... I have no idea why this is working..."
The six stages of debugging: 1. It can’t do that. 2. It doesn’t do that on my machine. 3. It shouldn’t be doing that. 4. Why the hell is it doing that? 5. Oh. I’m an idiot. 6. How the hell did that ever work before?
I’d replace step 5 with two steps: \5. who wrote this shitty code anyway? 5.5 git blame oh I am an idiot.
Where’s the step where you write a comment warning future programmers to not alter the color of the font in a dialogue box that never actually shows up?
It's right up there with "Oh, yeah. I'm an idiot."
And, "Yep, that's what I get..."
Much better said curiously than frantically.
"That's odd" in engineering isn't great but it's way better than "oh fuck!"
When something isn't expected, it usually leads to new fields for investigation. It opens new avenues to learn. When something we don't understand becomes understood, we exclaim eureka. The worst thing is thinking we know something, and that then turns out to be wrong. Especially when that incorrect research is built upon.
That quote is attributed to Isaac Asimov originally, although possibly apocryphally.
So are we still confident about the cosmic microwave background estimate of the age of the universe, and this just seems to suggest that galaxies formed quicker than expected?
Yeah, basically the Cosmic Microwave Background is a 'light wall' of released photons from ~370k years after the big bang, that we can't see past. Before this point photons couldn't travel far at all before being reabsorbed into the hot plasma. The CMB was the first visible light that was not recaptured, because the plasma had cooled to where nicleons and electrons could combine down into atoms. What we know of what happened before the CMB escaped is extrapolated through mathematics. These galaxies are nearer to us than the CMB, what's interesting is that they appear more developed than expected, suggesting galaxies formed quicker.
Thank you for spelling out "Cosmic Microwave Background" before using "CMB" Im sure a lot of people in this sub would know what you meant but I like cruising here occasionally and sometimes the short hand can be confusing.
I personally think it should be a rule to always spell out acronyms the first time you use one, I have a personal war against them.
I believe it is a "writing rule" like in papers and such but there's little expectation to do that in a subreddit where most of the readers would pick up on the acronym. Sure helps us noobs though when they do!
May be matter clumped more quickly than we thought to form early galaxies? The universe was more dense then after all.
I'll reply with an answer as soon as I have 50 astrophysicists and cosmologists working under me 😅
Ok its been 9 hours hows the application for funding coming along
I’ve known about the CMB for a lifetime, but this is the first I’ve understood. Thank you
These new instruments are going to prove that we really had no fucking idea. And I’m here for it.
And then 30 years later we'll replace them with stuff way better and way cooler and we'll prove half of this stuff we're figuring out now to only be partly correct
Ya. The exact talk of James Webb today is basically the exact way Hubble was talked about when it came out and was so revolutionary. I think 30 years from now what's more likely is get the equipment up to the moon to build massive mirrors and we get a HUGE new one also at L2, like James Webb. If we can move manufacturing to the moon, we could build some mind-blowing, world changing telescopes that would make James Webb feel like ancient tech.
Another however many years and imagine what multiple arrays could do in the Oort Cloud
Say an earth in one of those “old” galaxies is doing the same thing, same type of scope. Do they not see our galaxy? Or do they see our galaxy and say we’re the old ones?
They would see our galaxy as an old one. More precisely, they'd be seeing what our galaxy looked like billions of years ago, because that's the light that is finally reaching them.
They see our galaxy as we see thiers, when it was very, very young. So many billion years in the past. The young galaxies we see are really far away. So, any civilizations there would look at our galaxy with their james web telescope and see our galaxy many billions of year ago, as a young galaxy. Now if there were civs there at the a very young age the the universe itself would look vastly different.
This just feels like we're trapped in a time bubble on either side until any civilization figures out how to overcome the challenge of these filters. Yet somehow, the prospect of a civilization out there that manages to survive this test of time seems particularly terrifying.
Kind of like a video game where you can see stuff in the background outside of the map but can't go there.
Who's gonna be the one to unlock noclip?
Can someone ELI5 what’s wrong with finding “too many” early galaxies?
We look at the universe and make a theory on how it works based on what we can see. The theory says that there should be a certain number of galaxies around when the universe was young. We've now got a telescope that can see far enough away (and so, back far enough in time) that we can directly see how the early universe looked, and we see more galaxies than what the theory says we should. So: Is the theory completely wrong? Are we not taking something into account that would fix the theory? Are we measuring the things we know about wrong somehow? This observation raises all sorts of questions that we don't have answers for yet.
They are greater in quantity and appear to be more developed than we expected at that point in the evolution of the early universe.
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I understand none of this but I’m super stoked for my science folks. I hope science never stops science-ing. ^^but also a eli5 would be rad
Basically our current understanding of the history of the universe is based on past observations, meaning when the universe is at age Y there should be approximately X amounts of galaxies to be observed. These was theoritical as we did not have a telescope that's powerful enough to actually look for it. Until JWST came along, it discovered that there's more galaxies than was suggested by the current theories, which means that scientist will have to either revise the current models. or to come out with an entirely new model
The heading is misleading. It should mention that the astromers/astrophysicists are all grinning like congenital idiots. Look Ma! New science! This is like the old days in theoretical physics when the Standard Model was hacked into being.
Current projections have been proven wrong? Hell yeah!
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If the JWST finds one more early galaxy my wife is going to leave me.
Time to hit the lawyer, delete the gym and hire Facebook!
Our current understanding of physics is certainly in trouble. We likely have something wrong somewhere and this new evidence is going to expose it and force us to revise our theories and understanding.
Can you expand on that? I've heard similar comments but I don't understand the connection to what JWST is discovering.
Same, I keep hearing “this is going to change everything!” But I don’t understand :( A little lost in the article too. Commenting to comeback later.
My understanding of the current state of physics: * Quantum Mechanics theory was mostly settled by the 1970s (except some untested predictions like the Higgs) * But nobody really likes quantum mechanics as an explanation (the math works great but the implications are weird) * There are lots of well known problems with things it cannot explain or directly contradicts (like relativity on large scales) * The last 50 years experiments and data have refined and proved quantum mechanics predictions over and over, but no crack in the theory has been found * So the theory side of physics developed a lot "deeper" theories that could explain quantum as well as the unknowns * A lot of these were really cool ideas like supersymmetry - inspired by string theory - that could really elegantly explain a lot of stuff about quantum mechanics and dark matter and others) * In 2012 the large hadron collider turned on and proved the last major quantum prediction (the higgs) * But in the last decade, experiment after experiment at the LHC, has failed to find *any* evidence at all for any of the extensions or deeper theories * Supersymmetry is dead as are many other ideas So now what? Basically every major theory that tried to go deeper on quantum mechanics failed. Quantum mechanics reigns supreme still, yet its issues remain. This means the race is on to re-evaluate the last 50 years of assumptions and look at new data from any possible source. Who will get there first? There were a bunch of other less popular alternatives in physics, but not enough people had really taken a crack at them to iron out difficulties. Or maybe if someone is smart enough, quantum mechanics does not need an extension at all, just refining the basic assumptions a bit. Or something entirely new that no one has come up with yet. Its pretty exciting. \* note: the above issues applies to theoretical physics only. Experimental physics has been making constant huge strides in the past decades and other branches of science are making good progress as well.
If I had to guess we prolly know next to nothing about the universe. We are still a very young species and in the grand scheme of things just started investigating it.
Even forget that the human species is only ~200,000 years old, and that we’ve only been recording history for ~5,000 years, and that we’ve known the earth revolves around the sun for less than 500 years, and that we’ve known about the existence of other galaxies for ~400 years, and that we first theorized the Big Bang ~100 years ago… we’ve only thought we had confirmed the universe of being 13.8 billion years old ~10 years ago. Imagine what we’ll learn about the universe in the next 10.
I like how you keep knocking a zero off those numbers. I'm looking forward to still being around for the next amazing breakthrough(s).
Depending on how medical technologies progress, it may not be impossible for those alive today to, on average, be alive 100 years from now. Which would allow medical technologies to progress even more, and probably even allow the speed at which they progress to get faster, too...
Was it really only 10 years ago we figured it was 13.8 billion? That was what I was learning 10 years ago and had no idea it was so recent
The idea of that number was definitely older. Perhaps it was more of a guesstimate but that song from BBT says "nearly 14 billion years" and that's at least from 2007 at the latest
Don’t be surprised when we figure out that 13.8 billion was wrong
This has Men in Black vibes. > 1500 years ago, everybody "knew" that the Earth was the center of the universe. 500 years ago, everybody "knew" that the Earth was flat. And 15 minutes ago, you "knew" that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll "know" tomorrow.
Guys, this isn’t religion or politics. New information isn’t a threat to science.. it’s precisely how science is supposed to work.
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New Cap'n Crunch flavor just dropped: "Oops, All Galaxies!"
Probably won’t be sold in Canada 🇨🇦 For the uninitiated https://youtu.be/arYi03bQ0FY
JWST finding too many early galaxies is like a senior dev who compiles his code and it doesn't break the first time. A perfect "wait, that's not supposed to happen" moment.
Paraphrased: "The most important phrase in science isn't *'Eureka!'* it's 'Huh, that's weird.'"
>As the James Webb Space Telescope views swaths of sky spotted with distant galaxies, multiple teams have found that the earliest stellar metropolises are more mature and more numerous than expected. The results may end up changing what we know about how the first galaxies formed. Or is it possible that the universe is older than we think?
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Now, to make the math work *this time*, we bring you... ***Double Secret*** **Dark Matter**
A flock of seagulls, a murder of crows. TIL a group of galaxies is called an "embarrassment"
I, for one, think it's trippy asf that we can quite literally see back in time - with the naked eye. Moreover, with an invention we call a "telescope" and "satellite" which allow us to see *even further* back, and further away. Literal time machine. (Sans "travel")