I've wondered how blackholes have a similar 2d shape as with hurricanes and whirlpools where the center is empty. What if the inside of a blackhole is devoid of all things including spacetime, although that doesn't make good scifi.
JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe
71–80 of 186 posts
Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes I despair for humanity [see advertising/social media/politics], but then I see something like this and think, we're doing pretty well for self-taught primates.
and then we see all of the belief systems to mock, punish, or worse people that are trying to expand human knowledge. looking back at history, you have to wonder where we might be now if there wasn't this attempts at mass eradication of learning. there are times i wonder if we're heading in that direction again. this time, rather than burning the Library of Alexandria or locking everything in catacombs, if we're not…
I mean it really depends on your personal experience to how your perspective or "where we are now" feels. It's not like everyone is even remotely concerned with or benefitting from this "advancement."
A lot of the so called progress has done nothing but destroyed and distort an enjoyable and peaceful existence.
Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If it was a game mechanic I'd call it a cunning way to impose internally consistent limits on what the player can know. But if you assume it's a multi-player game, wouldn't it be easier to implement a global space-time? The reality is that you have to keep an internal clock for each player.
Partition them by velocity
Velocity relative to what?
Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe
#74So this is one of them "shower thoughts", you know, those stupid things you think about while working on something else.That is, purely science fiction. Can an analog be drawn between galaxies and solar system creation theories, with several orders of magnitudes in time required for formation due to scale difference. That is, the galaxies we see with their billions of stars are actually young proto accretion disks. w…
I'm here for shower thoughts-driven discourse. But I missed the point. Stars eventually wind up as black holes. So it stands to reason so would galaxies. But then why would they be all over the early universe?
> Stars eventually wind up as black holes.
The vast majority of stars will end up as white dwarfs. Stars need to be about 10 times the mass of the sun to undergo core collapse, and about 25 solar masses (or more, depending on composition) to form black holes.
> So it stands to reason so would galaxies.
Galaxies are loosely bound clouds of dust with a few stars here and there, relatively speaking; stars are dense roiling balls of plasma. Their dynamics are extremely different.
Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe
#75> Galactic spectra, which JWST started to send back in earnest at the end of last year, are useful for two reasons. > First, they let astronomers nail down the galaxy’s age. The infrared light JWST collects is reddened, or redshifted, meaning that as it traverses the cosmos, its wavelengths are stretched by the expansion of space. The extent of that redshift lets astronomers determine a galaxy’s distance, and therefo…
> Won't a photon climbing out of a huge gravity well have a huge redshift, Yes > thus confounding estimates of distance from us and estimated age? Not if you know, or can get a good estimate of, the potential well it's climbing out of. That said, Brian Cox does sometimes joke that astronomers round π to 1; while I wouldn't know about the reality, it's probably safe to infer at least some frustration on his part about…
I was confused... the symbol π is actually Pi, but it renders as something that looks like a different alphabet entirely on HN.
Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, this is awesome.
Sometimes I despair for humanity [see advertising/social media/politics], but then I see something like this and think, we're doing pretty well for self-taught primates.
That will happen when you are a̶r̶t̶i̶f̶i̶c̶i̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶p̶r̶o̶g̶r̶a̶m̶m̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶h̶u̶m̶a̶n̶s̶ [1] making technology for selling ads every day.
Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
and then we see all of the belief systems to mock, punish, or worse people that are trying to expand human knowledge. looking back at history, you have to wonder where we might be now if there wasn't this attempts at mass eradication of learning. there are times i wonder if we're heading in that direction again. this time, rather than burning the Library of Alexandria or locking everything in catacombs, if we're not…
I mean it really depends on your personal experience to how your perspective or "where we are now" feels. It's not like everyone is even remotely concerned with or benefitting from this "advancement." A lot of the so called progress has done nothing but destroyed and distort an enjoyable and peaceful existence.
I guess we might be better off if Pol Pot had killed more smart people than he did. Maybe Trump will win and finish off the rest of us and you can be happy.
We dill die fighting though, good luck
Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe
#78This is super cool. I think it's funny how Quanta writes, "It is expected because JWST was built, in part, to find the ancient objects." "Ancient" is equivalent to "distant" because of special relativity. It's an odd thing, astronomy - it's a real world time-traveling observation, except we're limited in resolution and we can't look here only there . If it was a game mechanic I'd call it a cunning way to impose inter…
> If it was a game mechanic I'd call it a cunning way to impose internally consistent limits on what the player can know. But if you assume it's a multi-player game, wouldn't it be easier to implement a global space-time? The reality is that you have to keep an internal clock for each player.
In practice you need a global coordinate system. For example, you'd create a "spawn point" for all players, and then, before the game starts, move them to their starting positions at a fraction of c. The game is still keeping track of units within this initial coordinate system, and transform those coordinates for the player. The reverse is done for player decisions. There is effectively an in-game "star network" that mediates between player. Each player/unit has a unique light cone associated with it.
Nothing stops us from arbitrarily designating a particular reference frame as "preferred" in a simulation; SR merely says that such a choice is truly arbitrary. Note also that this system could work recursively, such that new units must always spawn at the spacetime location of older units, and do information management (behind the scenes) in a similar way. This would turn the network into a tree - and the transforms are relatively cheap (and we could use a Spacetime algebra library!)
Note that I don't think this works for a traditional RTS like C&C or Supreme Commander. But rather a game like Civilization, but galaxy spanning (and spanning very long periods of time), where the smallest objects are something like "suns" and "fleets". The individual lives of humans would come and go as these vast battles took place over thousands of years. You'd only need to add magic like a 1g constant acceleration drive - and a strong rule against using this to directly kill planets - and assume that the fleets are actually large-ish asteroids fitted with the drives and a human and/or robotic crew.
The spawn point would then be, fittingly, Sol.
Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe
#79A part of CCC[1] is giant black holes outlasting the end of the universe to be around for the beginning of the next one. Is this a potential explanation?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformal_cyclic_cosmology
Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe
#80This is super cool. I think it's funny how Quanta writes, "It is expected because JWST was built, in part, to find the ancient objects." "Ancient" is equivalent to "distant" because of special relativity. It's an odd thing, astronomy - it's a real world time-traveling observation, except we're limited in resolution and we can't look here only there . If it was a game mechanic I'd call it a cunning way to impose inter…
> internally consistent limits on what the player can know Interesting thought. Can you expand? What do you mean by this?
Sure. I expanded in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37128472