Anyone else think this is a huge non-story? Like, of course there's going to be oxygen in distant galaxies. Why wouldn't there be? It would be far more interesting if there wasn't oxygen in distant galaxies.
>Galaxies usually start their lives full of young stars, which are made mostly of light elements like hydrogen and helium. As stars evolve, they create heavier elements like oxygen, which get dispersed through their host galaxy after they die. Researchers had thought that, at 300 million years old, the Universe was still too young to have galaxies ripe with heavy elements. However, the two ALMA studies indicate JADES-GS-z14-0 has about 10 times more heavy elements than expected.
I didn't know this so I also wasn't surprised by the headline. Although it seems from this quote that they also did expect oxygen to be there, just not as much as they determined to be there. Although I have almost zero interest in space so perhaps this is bigger than I understand. I only clicked on the article because oxygen seems like a pretty simple compound to me and was surprised by the headline. I also think the headline is somewhat misleading due to the point above and how distant the galaxy is isn't the actual the newsworthy point as you say. It is only relevant to the extent that light from distant galaxies reaches earth slower.
The real headline should be something like "more oxygen than expected is created in young galaxies" which is indeed one of those space articles I would never click on.
I'm no astronomer but I believe that the first stars tended to be huge and short-lived. Is it surprising that there would have been supernova and heavy elements ejected from them that early?
We expected heavy elements from supernova. It’s surprising that there is 10x more heavy elements than expected. Were there more supernova? Bigger ones? Are we missing other pieces of the picture?
Is a single order of magnitude within a reasonable range of error for the calculation? Some cases that is a massive miss, but other cases that might be within the expected statistical range. In the former cases it implies something entirely missing, while the latter cases are more likely to be known uncertainties which can now be better refined.
Surprising in the sense that they have models and predictions putting out some number and this new measurement showed that they're not exactly correct. Could almost say business as usual when it comes to science like this.
Based on our current models, it takes a long amount of time for elements as heavy as oxygen to be formed, especially in large enough quantities that it can be detected. And when looking at a very distant galaxy, what we're seeing is an image of how it looked like very early in its lifetime. So, the expectation based on certain models was that oxygen would not have yet formed at the time in the history of the universe when this image left towards us.
The expectation is indeed that all galaxies will have more or less the exact same elements that we have at ~13 billion years of age. But the image here is from a galaxy that was, at the time the image was emitted towards us, much younger than that.
No, it's a big deal. The oxygen existed ~300 million years after the Big Bang. So what has to happen is hydrogen and helium have to coalesce into galaxy and into nebulae, some event probably has to trigger star formation and the stars created have to be really large.
To put this in persepctive, our Sun, which is larger than the median star, produces no oxygen and is ~4.5 billion years old.
Larger stars are theorized to undergo the so-called CNO cycle [1]. To get to this process after "only" 300 million years means the star or stars are truly massive.
Along with the first stars being massive the JWST is showing giant quasars with mostly gas around them which may not quite confirm direct collapse black holes, but it is pointing in that direction very strongly.
Because the light we're seeing from this galaxy is from only 300 million years after the big bang. Elements like oxygen primarily form in supernovae, and the abundance of oxygen and other heavy elements in this extremely young galaxy is ten times higher than expected.
There is no way we are alone in this universe, what would really be a big deal though is if there are somehow able to traverse light years to reach us.
No, but I've seen a _lot_ of videos from people who don't know what aircraft look like at night. And a handful of off-the-shelf drones, probably flying around in response to the first group of videos.
The headline is a non-story. Us being wrong about how we thought galaxies form is, in fact, an interesting story. From the article:
"The results show the galaxy has formed very rapidly and is also maturing rapidly, adding to a growing body of evidence that the formation of galaxies happens much faster than was expected."
An earlier story posted here, discussed the presence of water around a most distant supernova remnant. The gas surrounding the star had been fused by the shockwave into an expanding sphere of nearly uniform oxygen which then combined with the remaining hydrogen to produce an enormous volume of damp air.
Just a few molecules per cubic meter or less. Estimated at ten trillion times the entire volume of water on earth. Seemed like a lot at the time.
It tells us that our cosmological models are wrong, which in turn tells us that we don’t understand fundamental physics principles models are built on, and this is a big deal.
In my eyes even finding life is semi a non-story. Or like obviously there's going to be life even intelligent life since it spawned here. Any idea that we're unique is silly we're just emergent phenomena of initial conditions.
Honestly, yes, but only very briefly, as "most distant known galaxy" should show as a very odd beast indeed with the signatures for the lightest elements only, but what is hanging is that there may be even heavier elements, as the search was to detect just oxygen, confirming that, but discussing nothing else.
A lot of modern science is just fishing for funding to keep running a big machine at something then having the ordained priests interpret the output
Instead of inventing something interesting like "we're able to scan the elemental composition of every galaxy within a radius within seconds" i.e. solve the problem rather than create useless papers and PR.
Scientists have to publish a lot of papers (even useless ones) because that is how we have decided to rate them, for better or worse.
And yes, they all mostly need to fish for funding to keep their not-so-well paid jobs going.
They are hardly "ordained priests" though. I think you are trying to insult them, but not really sure what you even mean. They are pretty much by definition highly intelligent people who could earn a lot more by working for FAANG or hedge funds, but prefer to take lower paid work on the off chance they get to discover something interesting about the universe we live in. So not much like priests then.
> They are pretty much by definition highly intelligent people who could earn a lot more by working for FAANG or hedge funds
Having interviewed many failed priests of higher education, this is not true. It might have been true 50 years ago, but if you are smart and intelligent you typically do not spend 5-7 of the most productive years of your life getting a PhD.
>but prefer to take lower paid work on the off chance they get to discover something interesting about the universe we live in. So not much like priests then.
This is exactly what priests do for religion right? Academics are ordained priests educated in the Seminary of Higher Education. You need to be granted a Doctor of Philosophy in order to join the Church of Higher Education, and then maybe a few decades of cloistered contemplation and publishing of prayers to the funding agencies will let you do something useful.
Everyone I've met with a PhD was intelligent. Maybe not genius, but yeah, pretty damn intelligent.
If you want to spend your life in the pursuit of knowledge rather than mere money or status, it's kind of a prerequisite to demonstrate you can perform original research.
I honestly don't get the analogy with priests. They still seem utterly different to me.
Organized religion ordains priests to read the sacred texts (papers, theses, books) and then anoints them to be the only ones allowed to do ministry and theology. Then they fight among themselves to be allowed to get resources and rise up the ranks of the church.
The analog is with forcing promising researchers to go through 5-10 years of thankless "training" to be granted a doctorate, so that they can be taken "seriously" by granting institutions, and have them fight among themselves so they can get resources and rise up the ranks of academia.
It's the same institutional structure, not anything to do with the content, and this is by design since academia and the Church were one and the same centuries ago!
Of course the idea that you don't need institutional approval to do something is alien to someone steeped in this worldview, but this is the news site for YC, most famous for telling people no, in fact you don't have to waste a decade working before doing something interesting.
Hmmm. You are describing pretty much any human organisation where people have to compete for limited resources.
I disagree strongly with describing learning what we currently know (or think we know) as reading sacred texts and being annointed as the only ones allowed to perform scientific research.
Scientific texts are very much not sacred. Yes, there are orthodoxies which most people believe, and if you are going to go against them, you better have damn good evidence. But you absolutely can challenge them, which is how science progresses and is the key difference between religion and science.
Since I just had a paper published in a computer science academic journal last year, (and I'm very much not an academic), I also challenge the idea that only people within the "priesthood" are allowed to practice the discipline. Obviously this will be rarer than people whose day job is doing this, but there is no license to practice science required from an anointed priesthood.
So forgive me if I really push back on that analogy, as it obscures the absolutely critical differences between them.
So? The whole point of academia is that they aren't bound by customers. Except that's been subverted by having to kowtow to funding agencies and universities most concerned with accruing and distributing money. Defeating the whole point of having them in the first place! Free and open markets are far more efficient at distributing and allocating capital.
You are confusing academia with science. A lot of science is done in academia, but a lot is also done in the commercial sector.
Obviously the commercial sector won't typically fund things unless there is some probable payback, so they are not so good at doing fundamental research.
I'm explicitly not. And you have no idea how much fundamental research happens in the commercial sector because there's no incentive to publish it -- why would I publish the trade secrets for you to exploit? For the record, work I've done under NDA would easily disprove a number of academic theories right now but there's no way I could get the companies to allow me to publish it (nor would I want to tank their stock).
Furthermore, academia doesn't do research unless there's a payback either in papers or prestige. What academia are you thinking of that allows for the pure pursuit of whatever's interesting?
