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@dang the article does not seem to imply that molecular oxygen was found. maybe retitle to "Oxygen element" or "Atomic oxygen"?
Off topic: - Is the big bang theory the scientific consensus on the origin and evolution of the universe ? - What are the alternatives ?
Note the theory in this release is the oxygen is from a mature star releasing heavier elements, not plant life. I thought oxygen detection was extremely difficult, they must have better methods now. adding: https://news.arizona.edu/news/how-next-gen-telescopes-could-...
Anyone else think this is a huge non-story? Like, of course there's going to be oxygen in distant galaxies. Why wouldn't there be? It would be far more interesting if there wasn't oxygen in distant galaxies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the article: >Galaxies usually start their lives full of young stars, which are made mostly of light elements like hydrogen and helium. As stars evolve, they create heavier elements like oxygen, which get dispersed through their host galaxy after they die. Researchers had thought that, at 300 million years old, the Universe was still too young to have galaxies ripe with heavy elements. However, the two ALMA stud…
> more oxygen than expected is created in young galaxies Or we have fundamental errors in measuring distances and ages of things which is leading to these unexpected observations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of modern science is just fishing for funding to keep running a big machine at something then having the ordained priests interpret the output Instead of inventing something interesting like "we're able to scan the elemental composition of every galaxy within a radius within seconds" i.e. solve the problem rather than create useless papers and PR.
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…
Anyone else think this is a huge non-story? Like, of course there's going to be oxygen in distant galaxies. Why wouldn't there be? It would be far more interesting if there wasn't oxygen in distant galaxies.
No, it's a big deal. The oxygen existed ~300 million years after the Big Bang. So what has to happen is hydrogen and helium have to coalesce into galaxy and into nebulae, some event probably has to trigger star formation and the stars created have to be really large. To put this in persepctive, our Sun, which is larger than the median star, produces no oxygen and is ~4.5 billion years old. Larger stars are theorized…
@dang the article does not seem to imply that molecular oxygen was found. maybe retitle to "Oxygen element" or "Atomic oxygen"?
Oxygen is the name of the element. The usage of oxygen to describe the molecule that does have bonding of two oxygen atoms is the source of confusion not the reverse.