51–60 of 547 posts
I may be stupid, but considering that the models of galaxy stability are based on a universe where we are made from star stuff and not energy stuff, is it not possible that they formed way quicker with less complication because it was basically only hydrogen and empty space?
Can someone explain to me what would be behind the galaxies if we could see it, to the point of 0 seconds after the big bang? Black, white, is it even possible?
But to the larger point, these galaxies were suspected before, based on Hubble work. You see, the COBE satellite from 1989 to 1993 mapped the microwave background radiation very precisely (two of the Principal Investigators on COBE won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work). And they found that while there are minute fluctuations in the radiation, those fluctuations are measured at the parts-per-million level of difference. But the Hubble has found that the farthest back galaxies it could see were some of the largest and most massive things ever witnessed. So we had this gap between 'everything everywhere is the same to parts per million' and 'there are some supermassive galaxies' and so the Webb telescope was specifically designed to find the things that were redshifted so far they were out of the visible spectrum (so Hubble couldn't see them) but not so far that COBE could see them in microwave: in the infrared spectrum that lies between those two, that's where Webb is supposed to focus and help us understand how these galaxies form.
Because this question of what happened between the CMBR and the visible light range is the biggest question left over from Hubble, so it is what drove the design of the Webb. This is how astronomy has worked for centuries: you build a new telescope to answer some questions, but that leaves you with more questions, so you need to build new telescopes to answer those questions, GOTO 1. That's what's been happening ever since Galileo looked through that telescope at Jupiter all the way back in 1610.
Worth noting: For a very long time MOND has been predicting earlier galaxies than LCDM.
This is not unusual. There's many predictions made by MOND ahead of the fact that are borne out by reality. But don't worry - dark matter will be "retrofitted" so that it fits the facts and everybody will suffer collective memory loss again. Edit: see for example table 1 on page 12 here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2110.06936.pdf from a review of prior expectations by both MOND and dark matter vs how they turned out agains…
Worth noting: For a very long time MOND has been predicting earlier galaxies than LCDM.
This is not unusual. There's many predictions made by MOND ahead of the fact that are borne out by reality. But don't worry - dark matter will be "retrofitted" so that it fits the facts and everybody will suffer collective memory loss again. Edit: see for example table 1 on page 12 here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2110.06936.pdf from a review of prior expectations by both MOND and dark matter vs how they turned out agains…
Is this satire?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without getting into lots of detail, this is basically correct. It's why we talk about the observable universe. There's lots of stuff we can't see because the light from it won't reach us.
I was thinking about something weird right now. We don't (can't?) even know if there weren't multiple Big Bangs, right? I.e we're just in a specific "universe" we can observe, but maybe several of these are just side by side, not necessarily parallel as in parallel realities.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We can't see down to 0 seconds, because very soon after the big bang, the universe was filled with dense, extremely hot, opaque plasma. The closest we can get is the "recombination epoch" [0], which is roughly 370 000 years after the big bang, when, because of universal expansion, the plasma got cold enough for neutral hydrogen to start forming, at which point the universe became transparent. As protons gain electron…
So if we can see CMB in all directions, why do we really even say "the observable universe" as though there could be more matter and more galaxies beyond what we can see? If the maximum of what we can see is implied to be before all galaxies, then shouldn't it be implied that all galaxies that exist can be seen?
There might be galaxies even further away, but you can't ever see them, not even in theory. The light from them will never reach us because they flying away from us further than the speed of light.
The CMB isn't really about galaxies. We know there won't be any galaxies past the CMB because galaxies couldn't have formed before the CMB was emitted.
In theory we can "see" past the CMB using gravitational waves. (There was a thought, in fact, that we'd already done that, but that appears to have been faulty.) The CMB is just kind of a practical limitation rather than a fundamental matter of spacetime: you can't see because it's too cloudy.
The question of whether galaxies beyond the observable universe "exist" is kind of a matter of metaphysics rather than astrophysics. As an astrophysicist, you basically just say they don't exist and you're done with it. But if you want to know where the universe "came from" (whatever that turns out to mean), you try playing around with notions like "our universe is an observable sub-part of a wider ensemble, which we'll never detect, but here's a pretty set of equations which explain our universe in terms of it".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> because the light from it won't reach us. This is one of the most interesting aspects to the universe. It's not, "because the light from it hasn't reached us yet but is on the way and will get here eventually." Rather it's that the rate of expansion of the universe is accelerating, so that we're moving away from parts of it faster than its light can cover the distance to us. It will never reach us. That's mindboggl…
What do I have to study to understand all this in mathematical terms? Is an undergrad text good enough?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comoving_and_proper_distances#...
https://public.nrao.edu/ask/inconsistency-between-the-age-an...
However, the local group/cluster of galaxies is close enough to remain gravitationally bound, and we're still gonna merge with Andromeda.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without getting into lots of detail, this is basically correct. It's why we talk about the observable universe. There's lots of stuff we can't see because the light from it won't reach us.
> because the light from it won't reach us. This is one of the most interesting aspects to the universe. It's not, "because the light from it hasn't reached us yet but is on the way and will get here eventually." Rather it's that the rate of expansion of the universe is accelerating, so that we're moving away from parts of it faster than its light can cover the distance to us. It will never reach us. That's mindboggl…
It's actually even worse than that. Because of the accelerating expansion of the universe, over time the part of the universe that we can observe will get smaller, allowing us to see less and less of it. Eventually, all that we'll be able to see is our own local group of galaxies, where gravitational attraction will win out over the universe's expansion. However, this won't really be a problem for a few billion years.
Relevant Kurzgesagt video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzkD5SeuwzM
It the pattern of previous science revolutions repeats, there could come a point where reinterpreting the large existing body of knowledge using a different paradigm would explain an number of "oddities" in a more economical way.
I don't know if this generation of telescopes will get us there but it feels that this is a plausible outcome over the next 1-2 decades. Which would be very exciting :-)
Can someone explain to me what would be behind the galaxies if we could see it, to the point of 0 seconds after the big bang? Black, white, is it even possible?
Correct me if I'm wrong. Cosmic microwave background is behind the galaxies, and we can see it. The universe is mostly transparent these days, so light can travel across the universe from a distant galaxy to our eyes or telescopes. Long ago, the universe was full of ions-free electrons and protons-and these are very effective at scattering light, so the universe was effectively opaque at that point. The universe beca…
It's conceivable that we could observe gravitational waves during that period before the CMB, because they're not blocked by the un-recombined electrons and protons. If we ever get there, it could help explain the small variations in CMB from place to place. But that's a long way off.