>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.
>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.