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Astronomers puzzled by little red galaxies that seem impossibly dense

newscientist.com

41–50 of 66 posts

Re: Astronomers puzzled by little red galaxies that seem impossibly dense

#41
post #23

Is this what a group of type III civilizations look like on the Kardashev scale? Back when the universe was hot and dense and it was still fun?

Well, the universe is very heterogeneous, you see. There's still plenty of hot, dense, and fun to go around, you just have to look in the right places!

Colder is actually better and more fun. You see, the theoretical lower limit for how much energy your super-computer takes to run is given by temperature, and thus on a larger scale by the temperature of the background radiation in your part of the cosmos. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle

Re: Astronomers puzzled by little red galaxies that seem impossibly dense

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might be too early for planets, at least rocky ones. I'm not exactly sure of the timeline for these stars, but planets require at least a generation or two of stars and novas to fuse heavy elements, and we're probably looking at some of the earliest stars formed (assuming it they are actually stars, not entirely clear yet). Also, if they're not sure how the stars themselves can survive being so close to each oth…

Man isn't that just so freaking cool. Matter comes together forms some kind of mechanical system to produce new materials which come together and form a new system and so on. Some how a few principles which all matter follows gets reproduced again and again at higher and higher scales. Is there a fun/good read on astronomy?

Most likely the same principle that formed earth and life will form else where even if slightly different

Re: Astronomers puzzled by little red galaxies that seem impossibly dense

#44

Is this what a group of type III civilizations look like on the Kardashev scale? Back when the universe was hot and dense and it was still fun?

Maybe that's another Great filter in Drake's equation - civilizations dumb enough to go full scale in crypto mining and 'AI' to generate cute cat pictures with nobody to stop for a second and think a bit. Those last few tokens will take half of universe's energy to mine, lets hope we are on the other side.

Re: Astronomers puzzled by little red galaxies that seem impossibly dense

#45
post #32

Is this what a group of type III civilizations look like on the Kardashev scale? Back when the universe was hot and dense and it was still fun?

occam's razor says probably not

Says who? Have you considered the alternatives?

Re: Astronomers puzzled by little red galaxies that seem impossibly dense

#47
post #42
post #39

The preprint version of the main paper being discussed: https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2408.07745

"We stress, however, that the canonical interpretation of AGNs causing the broad Hβ lines also remains viable."

What’s the layperson’s interpretation of this?

Re: Astronomers puzzled by little red galaxies that seem impossibly dense

#48
post #47
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We stress, however, that the canonical interpretation of AGNs causing the broad Hβ lines also remains viable."

What’s the layperson’s interpretation of this?

They have offered an interesting hypothesis (all those stars packed into a small space) but this other, perhaps more conventional, explanation for the observations is not ruled out.

Re: Astronomers puzzled by little red galaxies that seem impossibly dense

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

archive.ps or whatever the domain is now.

Plug: I made https://waybackinator.com/ >. You can just append a URL to the URL path to get a link to the most recent archive snapshot, if there is one. It uses the wayback machine's API. Example: 1. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2445967-astronomers-puz... 2. https://waybackinator.com/https://www.newscientist.com/artic... 3. "That URL is not available via the internet archive API." Oh well.

If it's just for The Wayback Machine, you can prepend https://web.archive.org/web/ to the URL; no need for the waybackinator indirection.

Re: Astronomers puzzled by little red galaxies that seem impossibly dense

#50
post #30
post #22

> it was missing other key features seen with black holes, such as X-rays and radio waves. There were also other features, such as a peak in the light’s brightness at certain frequencies, that suggested it came from stars Amateur speculation: A dense group of stars tightly circling an early forming supermassive black hole? The stars would be able to (mostly) block the radio and x-rays.

Space is big, really big, even if it looks small. I doubt you would be able to block enough but that is just armchair guessing. Things like reemission might also help?

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”

— Douglas Adams

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