I would be shocked if it were not found everywhere.
I'd be more worried if there was a whole bunch of carbon dioxide.
Oxygen atoms discovered in most distant known galaxy
121–130 of 189 posts
Re: Oxygen atoms discovered in most distant known galaxy
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scientists have to publish a lot of papers (even useless ones) because that is how we have decided to rate them, for better or worse. And yes, they all mostly need to fish for funding to keep their not-so-well paid jobs going. They are hardly "ordained priests" though. I think you are trying to insult them, but not really sure what you even mean. They are pretty much by definition highly intelligent people who could…
> They are pretty much by definition highly intelligent people who could earn a lot more by working for FAANG or hedge funds Having interviewed many failed priests of higher education, this is not true. It might have been true 50 years ago, but if you are smart and intelligent you typically do not spend 5-7 of the most productive years of your life getting a PhD. >but prefer to take lower paid work on the off chance…
Spend your prime making ads more effective instead.
Re: Oxygen atoms discovered in most distant known galaxy
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think I've ever been on a forum that doesn't have comments to that effect regularly. "It was better a few years ago, it's all going to hell now, we're becoming Reddit/4Chan/Slashdot" It's the internet forum version of "the youth has gotten lazy, it weren't like this when I were a lad"
I was on usenet in 1995 but I have heard that was too late and usenet already sucked then. In all fairness too, my 17 year old self who knew basically nothing about the world ,really did add absolutely nothing of value to the usenet discussions I participated in besides noise. Of course, at the time I thought the complete opposite. The thing that amuses me most is at the time there would have been a lot of "pro commu…
> I was on usenet in 1995 but I have heard that was too late and usenet already sucked then.
BBS were cool(er) :-)
Re: Oxygen atoms discovered in most distant known galaxy
#124Oxygen is everywhere. Hydrogen is everywhere. The possibilities are interesting.
Given how simple Water is and how readily available it's components are, it's inevitable there are many planets with vast oceans.
Re: Oxygen atoms discovered in most distant known galaxy
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Science cannot be trusted anymore. Journals don't validate anything they submit. Departments are rewarded by how much money they wring out of the government, not by whether what they say is true. Next week they'll publish another paper about how they were wrong. Also you don't sound "fascinated", so if you're complaining at least be honest about it. There are many more descriptive words than "fascinated".
> Next week they'll publish another paper about how they were wrong. Isn't that what's they're supposed to do? "Hey we found this thing, here's how we did it." Next week: "Yeah I checked your data and got different results, let's figure out what's different." A few months/years later: "We've figured out where the problems were and now have a better understanding of this."
Yeah - people forget that the true advantage science has over other methodologies is that it accepts that what is believed today could be proved wrong tomorrow by new data.
There are no absolutes, we're just formulating theories to best fit what data we have now, and, if new conflicting data (or even existing data that was misunderstood/misread/misclassified as being irrelevant) disproves our theory we formulate a new one to try and account for the extra data.
Re: Oxygen atoms discovered in most distant known galaxy
#126I'm always fascinated by the posters here who insist on second-guessing the writers and the scientists who spend their whole lives studying a topic like this. No one needs to read your post fessing up to your profound ignorance and the fact that you didn't really read the link.
I second this, and it tends to be a sitewide issue. HN has really changed over the past 5+ years: went from healthy or interesting skepticism to reddit-style snarkiness and shitposting.
This is refreshing to hear compared to all of the "HN is becoming Reddit, omg!" comments and threads that pop up every couple weeks.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=380385
From 2008 :)
Re: Oxygen atoms discovered in most distant known galaxy
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Science cannot be trusted anymore. Journals don't validate anything they submit. Departments are rewarded by how much money they wring out of the government, not by whether what they say is true. Next week they'll publish another paper about how they were wrong. Also you don't sound "fascinated", so if you're complaining at least be honest about it. There are many more descriptive words than "fascinated".
> Science cannot be trusted anymore. Journals don't validate anything they submit. Departments are rewarded by how much money they wring out of the government, not by whether what they say is true. Next week they'll publish another paper about how they were wrong. What do you feel when you post that?
I feel like my tax dollars are wasted and the college students are being lied to with their ever-increasing tuition that somehow promises them a future when their departments are led by liars.
Re: Oxygen atoms discovered in most distant known galaxy
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, but can you elaborate on that? In what sense are you thinking of?
In the sense that the point of “age” is supposed to indicate some kind of progress by which cohorts can be compared and classified into discrete groups. But increasingly, there is no correlation between age and specific developmental stages. It is merely a number that indicates how long something has been around but not what its current status may be.
this doesn't seem to provide much of a justification for an extraordinary claim like "the widely accepted number for the age of the universe is wrong by 4 billion years"?
Re: Oxygen atoms discovered in most distant known galaxy
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Skepticism is fair, but the confidence comes from how well we understand atomic spectra
Is that about as well as we understand the formation of the universe? /s
a lot better...we can excite these atoms in a lab and simply measure what comes out. often times don't even need a model because spectroscopy can be fully empirical for many transitions
Re: Oxygen atoms discovered in most distant known galaxy
#130How can they possibly be sure that it is oxygen doing that?
It is mind bending, but well understood (just not by me): we measure oxygen in distant galaxies using spectroscopy to identify specific emission lines in the galaxy's light, especially in the infrared spectrum.