Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Astronomers puzzled by little red galaxies that seem impossibly dense

newscientist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 66 posts

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

#51

Post by jfengel »

le-mark wrote: post #47
pfdietz wrote: 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're trying to figure out how fast the galaxy is rotating by looking at the redshift from the stars. Some are moving towards us and others away. That spreads out the distinctive frequency of hydrogen emissions.

They think it's broader than the conventional explanation (active galactic nuclei) can explain. But it can't be ruled out.

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

#52

Post by naikrovek »

gehsty wrote: post #46
nacho-daddy wrote: post #7

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?

This is what happens once you start down the road of making Paperclips…

Too soon.

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

#53

Post by ceejayoz »

blueflow wrote: post #40
ceejayoz wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm gonna guess that the prominent astronomers at several top-notch universities mentioned have heard of globular clusters, and that the reason it's not mentioned is it's not relevant.

Why? How do the astronomers know that its many stars, how did they rule out its the normal amount but brighter?

Which aspect of the answer do you want? You can write a textbook on such a broad question; how we determine the mass of a galaxy, its composition, its distance, etc.

JWST is seeing brand new things; globular clusters are so well documented as to be part of the original Messier catalog that predates the United States.

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

#54

Post by moi2388 »

fsflover wrote: post #33
moi2388 wrote: post #24

“Unlock this article” Please stop linking to paywalls ffs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

Waybackinator and web.archive.org don’t work, the latter also shows the paywall.

You can only post it with workarounds.

Furthermore it might also be legal to shit in your living room; I would however still consider it bad form.

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

#56

Post by Nuenki »

denderson wrote: post #50
consp wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I hope this quote has made its way into the academic literature in some way.

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

#57

Post by anon56237526 »

jwilk wrote: post #49
MathMonkeyMan wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've made a bookmark of the URL https://web.archive.org/web/%s in Firefox, and assigned the "wm" keyword to it, so I only have to prepend that.

LPT: you can right click on any search box and select "Set a keyword to this search" (or whatever it is exactly in English).

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

#58

Post by blueflow »

ceejayoz wrote: post #53
blueflow wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? How do the astronomers know that its many stars, how did they rule out its the normal amount but brighter?

Which aspect of the answer do you want? You can write a textbook on such a broad question; how we determine the mass of a galaxy, its composition, its distance, etc. JWST is seeing brand new things ; globular clusters are so well documented as to be part of the original Messier catalog that predates the United States.

The answer is not rocket science. JWST saw something, scientists made an interpretation, there should be an explanation "why" somewhere. And you won't need to write a textbook on that because you can cite prior work.

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

#59

Post by sesm »

stevenrj wrote: post #29
sesm wrote: post #3

Can those be just globular clusters in their 'bright' phase? Globular clusters are not even mentioned in that article, which is weird.

Assuming that all their light is coming from stars, they have far too much stellar mass (with stellar masses similar to the Milky Way) to be the progenitors of today's globular clusters.

In globular clusters stars tend to have similar age in terms of main sequence progression. If most of the stars approach their brightest phase, the cluster will be extremely bright relative to its mass.

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

#60

Post by ceejayoz »

blueflow wrote: post #58
ceejayoz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which aspect of the answer do you want? You can write a textbook on such a broad question; how we determine the mass of a galaxy, its composition, its distance, etc. JWST is seeing brand new things ; globular clusters are so well documented as to be part of the original Messier catalog that predates the United States.

The answer is not rocket science. JWST saw something, scientists made an interpretation, there should be an explanation "why" somewhere. And you won't need to write a textbook on that because you can cite prior work.

There is no solid/proven explanation right now. Only hypotheses to be tested. It’s a new phenomenon they’re working to understand.
Post reply on HN