You won't make it to the next iteration without wrapping yourself in a black hole and appearing as an anomaly to future observers.
Astrophysicists Puzzle over Webb’s New Universe
21–30 of 141 posts
Re: Astrophysicists Puzzle over Webb’s New Universe
#22The most exciting idea to me that JWST has bolstered is primordial black holes. Many models already predict them but JWST has provided the first good indirect evidence in the form of too-early galaxies. The models that predict PBHs predict that.
If they exist, they would not be constrained to stellar mass and above. There could be a population of little black holes floating around. Anything under the mass of a decent size asteroid would have evaporated by now but anything that mass and above would still exist.
They are a dark matter candidate, and one that doesn’t require new physics. But even if they don’t account for a significant amount of dark matter they still probably exist.
The most exciting thing about PBHs is that one or more may exist in our solar system. They might have been captured over billions of years. Finding them would be incredibly challenging, especially if they are low mass, but if we did it means we could directly examine and experiment on a black hole.
It could be something with the mass of a large asteroid but the size of a hydrogen atom. We could only find it by its gravitational effects. It would be utterly invisible otherwise unless it encountered matter and even then there might only be a tiny gamma ray flash, a nano accretion disc that lasts femtoseconds. We might also find smaller objects that appear to be orbiting nothing and find it that way.
Directly accessing one could allow us to test theories of quantum gravity and things like string theory, and maybe more. A black hole could be like a Rosetta Stone of deep fundamental physics.
The film Interstellar involved using plot magic to visit a black hole and solve physics, but this would allow it for real. It would just be an itty bitty one.
Re: Astrophysicists Puzzle over Webb’s New Universe
#23That’s a beautiful article showcasing our predicament in having access to more information about the universe. Now i have to be the one to ask the dumb defensive question: what makes us so certain that we can trust what we see on James Webb? Can we definitely discard a measurement problem?
Some of the Hubble results were also raising questions. At the same time, I read one of the papers on the galaxy stuff, and what struck me was they were identifying galaxy shapes by counting the pixels each galaxy had, so there are definitely some question marks over how they do some of this.
You would expect more background pixel fuzz when centering an image kernel over an artefact.
In Hubble, that fuzz was marked. With Webb, far less so.
I think these are real true positives
Re: Astrophysicists Puzzle over Webb’s New Universe
#24Nancy Grace Roman Telescope is also going to be amazing for raising new questions
and I hope the attempt to lift the Swift telescope to a higher orbit is successful
if you really want to stay on top of what is breaking astrophysics in realtime, I highly recommend following DrBecky on youtube or elsewhere, she is fantastic
Re: Astrophysicists Puzzle over Webb’s New Universe
#25As observations become too numerous, it seems like it can be summarized as there now being too many possible candidate explanations. As data increases and becomes clearer, more and more things don't fit the existing theories. What are the current theories explaining the early universe? What happened to the Big Bang? I only studied astronomy up to an undergraduate level, so I don't really know. I imagine that various…
I took a good long look at the CMB picture, including the caption. It basically says the Universe was one big hot apparently uniform ball at one stage. I don't know what conditions were like before that stage, but like Eric Idle says, nothing can come from nothing. Dark energy is a horse shit name for a theory that was horse shit to begin with. The Universe is probably just inhomogeneous, like your intuition is sayin…
Why do you say "probably"? We can measure and quantify the inhomogeneities very precisely, and they're tiny. This isn't a matter of opinion or intuition.
Re: Astrophysicists Puzzle over Webb’s New Universe
#26As observations become too numerous, it seems like it can be summarized as there now being too many possible candidate explanations. As data increases and becomes clearer, more and more things don't fit the existing theories. What are the current theories explaining the early universe? What happened to the Big Bang? I only studied astronomy up to an undergraduate level, so I don't really know. I imagine that various…
I took a good long look at the CMB picture, including the caption. It basically says the Universe was one big hot apparently uniform ball at one stage. I don't know what conditions were like before that stage, but like Eric Idle says, nothing can come from nothing. Dark energy is a horse shit name for a theory that was horse shit to begin with. The Universe is probably just inhomogeneous, like your intuition is sayin…
“Dark” matter and energy are placeholder names. “Dark” means “we don’t know” which either means we can’t see or detect it or there is an alternate explanation for the effect.
It’s like a comment in your code like \\ TODO…
I don’t see why that’s that hard, or why we’d expect to instantly be able to figure everything out.
Re: Astrophysicists Puzzle over Webb’s New Universe
#27> Faced with observations of early black holes and galaxies that weren’t expected to exist, scientists have come up with a wealth of new theories to explain them. Now they just need to figure out which ones are true. This subtitle really bothers me. Science isn't about finding out what is true. Science is about finding out what is false and building models to explain the rest. We can never confidently say we know som…
I think you are confusing the scientific process, in particular Popper's falsification principle, with science's purpose, which is to find the truth, or at least sort things into true and false. It's a bit like saying the purpose of programming is to have a bunch of unit tests.
Re: Astrophysicists Puzzle over Webb’s New Universe
#28The most exciting idea to me that JWST has bolstered is primordial black holes. Many models already predict them but JWST has provided the first good indirect evidence in the form of too-early galaxies. The models that predict PBHs predict that. If they exist, they would not be constrained to stellar mass and above. There could be a population of little black holes floating around. Anything under the mass of a decent…
Does PBH theory also predict >1 billion solar mass black holes so early?
Re: Astrophysicists Puzzle over Webb’s New Universe
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
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WTF. We have such great medical advancement in cancer treatments, vaccines, reconstructive surgery h just to name a few. Not sure what you are referring to, but the only unjustifiable things in the (so called) medical field are snake oil sales men trying to make a quick buck by instilling a fear of science into people's minds. Like anti-vax idiots. Or homeopathic bullshit.
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Re: Astrophysicists Puzzle over Webb’s New Universe
#30The most exciting idea to me that JWST has bolstered is primordial black holes. Many models already predict them but JWST has provided the first good indirect evidence in the form of too-early galaxies. The models that predict PBHs predict that. If they exist, they would not be constrained to stellar mass and above. There could be a population of little black holes floating around. Anything under the mass of a decent…
Of course if we had a black hole in a lab (or one in a convenient orbit) we could run all sort of experiments, but which experiments exactly? We will start by throwing things at it and watch, obviously, but that's unimaginative. What are the smart experiments?