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Oxygen atoms discovered in most distant known galaxy

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Re: Oxygen atoms discovered in most distant known galaxy

#141

Post by nimish »

MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #110
nimish wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So? The whole point of academia is that they aren't bound by customers. Except that's been subverted by having to kowtow to funding agencies and universities most concerned with accruing and distributing money. Defeating the whole point of having them in the first place! Free and open markets are far more efficient at distributing and allocating capital.

You are confusing academia with science. A lot of science is done in academia, but a lot is also done in the commercial sector. Obviously the commercial sector won't typically fund things unless there is some probable payback, so they are not so good at doing fundamental research. You need both to get the best returns.

I'm explicitly not. And you have no idea how much fundamental research happens in the commercial sector because there's no incentive to publish it -- why would I publish the trade secrets for you to exploit? For the record, work I've done under NDA would easily disprove a number of academic theories right now but there's no way I could get the companies to allow me to publish it (nor would I want to tank their stock).

Furthermore, academia doesn't do research unless there's a payback either in papers or prestige. What academia are you thinking of that allows for the pure pursuit of whatever's interesting?

Re: Oxygen atoms discovered in most distant known galaxy

#142

Post by stripykitteh »

slwvx wrote: post #138

From [1] and [2] we read that the CMB was created around 380 million years after the Big Bang, and that hydrogen atoms were created at the same time. The original article above [3] says that this galaxy was created when the universe was about 300 million years old. These seem to be in conflict; am I misunderstanding something, or is there really a conflict there? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_bac…

The CMB was created 380,000 years after the Big Bang. I think you misread [1] and [2].

Re: Oxygen atoms discovered in most distant known galaxy

#143

Post by hnuser123456 »

hnuser123456 wrote: post #12
scryers_bloom wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This galaxy in particular must be one of the first galaxies ever formed. If galaxies are more mature than initially thought, what does this imply about our previous models and imply about what might actually be happening?

There seems to be a large region of the universe, beyond furthest edges of the observable, but "in front of" the CMB, that is already outside of our past light cone due to expansion of the universe.

To add, Earth is only ~4.5 billion years old, the universe is 13.7 and possibly double that, so earth is only 1/3 the age of the universe. It took a lot of big stars going supernova to pollute the galaxy with enough dirt to make rocky planets, and in all that meantime, everything has been flying apart, with a significant chunk of it already so far away and expanding away even faster, there is measurable difference between the observable universe and the "whole universe."

Re: Oxygen atoms discovered in most distant known galaxy

#144

Post by [deleted] »

dvt wrote: post #88
gentle wrote: post #85

I'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.

[deleted]

Re: Oxygen atoms discovered in most distant known galaxy

#145

Post by acdha »

umeshunni wrote: post #135
acdha wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s always been some of that but it does feel like it’s getting worse. I think there’s a general shift in how people approach Skinner-ized apps and social media, where a couple of generations have been trained to prioritize a number going up, but also something about how politics became both post-factual and unavoidable even in communities which used to avoid it, all of which has driven a lot of former contributo…

> Skinner-ized What does this mean? A quick Google search didn't help me

mlekoszek answered very well, so I won’t duplicate their comment but I will note that I used to work with a bunch of neuroscientists and a number of grad students were recruited by tech companies specifically to use their knowledge of human behaviour and addition to boost “engagement” and revenue. There was some talk about ethics but even back then people knew those companies meant it about as much as big tobacco had.

Re: Oxygen atoms discovered in most distant known galaxy

#146

Post by wegfawefgawefg »

thurn wrote: post #128
deadbabe wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

officer she told me she was 4 billion years old

Re: Oxygen atoms discovered in most distant known galaxy

#147

Post by epistasis »

fasteo wrote: post #25

Off topic: - Is the big bang theory the scientific consensus on the origin and evolution of the universe ? - What are the alternatives ?

Big Bang Theory is a bunch of really solid observations and hypotheses mixed with a bunch of open questions, even about the fundamental nature of forces.

It was only 30 years ago that we discovered what we call now dark energy. And it turns out that within that short time frame we have multiple ways of measuring the amount of it, and those methods agree. There is more dark energy than dark matter, and that the visible matter is even a small fraction of the dark matter. But even with this discovery of the acceleration of expansion of the universe, the core big bang theory holds.

There are many alternatives to the predominant and not-yet-accepted-as-true Lambda-Cold Dark Matter model of physics, such as Timescapes, but none of them have enough evidence behind them to be considered serious alternatives at the moment.

Things like the Baryonic Acoustic Oscillation theoretical predictions, that are visualized in the spacing of galaxies, are literally mind blowing to me. Theoretical physics predicted how matter would behave when it's so hot and dense that none of it can even form atoms, and it predicts the structure of all sorts of things, even the variability we observe in the cosmic microwave background.

TL;DR The depth and consistency of observation that point to a big bang are stunning. But we still have so much we don't know about the particulars, and the fundamental forces.

Re: Oxygen atoms discovered in most distant known galaxy

#148

Post by UI_at_80x24 »

NotAnOtter wrote: post #124
joquarky wrote: post #109

Oxygen 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.

At least 30% of the bodies in _our_ solar system have vast oceans.

You are right, it's inevitable.

Re: Oxygen atoms discovered in most distant known galaxy

#149

Post by smj-edison »

awesome_dude wrote: post #125
ranger207 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ne…

Someone I know put this well: "science is just as gullible at following the latest trends. The difference is it corrects itself, where trends never do."

Re: Oxygen atoms discovered in most distant known galaxy

#150

Post by d34db33n0car »

acdha wrote: post #145
umeshunni wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Skinner-ized What does this mean? A quick Google search didn't help me

mlekoszek answered very well, so I won’t duplicate their comment but I will note that I used to work with a bunch of neuroscientists and a number of grad students were recruited by tech companies specifically to use their knowledge of human behaviour and addition to boost “engagement” and revenue. There was some talk about ethics but even back then people knew those companies meant it about as much as big tobacco had…

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