71–80 of 141 posts
So I wonder, where are these giant black holes now? There should be some closer to us than at the edge of the universe, unless something happens to them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_87#Supermassive_black_...
That’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?
This is one reason to dislike the NASA process of building one huge prestige telescope every few decades.
The 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…
There was a time where Hawking's A brief history of time gave a decent overview of the universe to beginners. Does anyone know how well it holds up today and if anything better exists?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What could go wrong?
Not much. A black hole isn't a magic cosmic vacuum cleaner. It's a dense piece of mass. An asteroid mass black hole the size of a hydrogen atom would be... an object the size of a hydrogen atom with the mass of an asteroid. You could orbit it and the orbital calculations, at a reasonable distance, would be the same as orbiting an asteroid. You just can't get too close or you get into that steep gravity well and "beco…
There was a time where Hawking's A brief history of time gave a decent overview of the universe to beginners. Does anyone know how well it holds up today and if anything better exists?
There was never a time when a book gave the public an overview of the universe. ABHOT was so popular for being a book no one actually read, theres even an index named after Hawking due to it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_Index Did _you_ read that book? There however definitely was a piece of media that captured public minds and educated them about the cosmos. And that was the show Cosmos. The original of cou…
I suspect that a popsci book becoming a bestseller creates a larger-than-the-usual-nerds audience, a big part of which lacks the motivation to actually finish it. I expect that in places like this you will find higher frequency of people who have actually read it.
Moreover, when i read the book i did not have easy access to pop-sci sources as a (practically pre-internet) teenager in a small town of a small country, like i would have had today. I got upon a booklet of a small publishing house with the titles of translated pop-sci books and would order them from a local bookstore. Maybe if I was already familiar enough with the topic through youtube videos etc I would not have finished either.
There was a time where Hawking's A brief history of time gave a decent overview of the universe to beginners. Does anyone know how well it holds up today and if anything better exists?
There was never a time when a book gave the public an overview of the universe. ABHOT was so popular for being a book no one actually read, theres even an index named after Hawking due to it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_Index Did _you_ read that book? There however definitely was a piece of media that captured public minds and educated them about the cosmos. And that was the show Cosmos. The original of cou…
However I still doubt the methodology. It is not obvious for me that if a book was read in full, then highlights from it would be distributed uniformly all over the book.
So I wonder, where are these giant black holes now? There should be some closer to us than at the edge of the universe, unless something happens to them.
The supermassive black hole in the giant elliptical galaxy M87 is merely ~53 million light years away, close enough that we have now imaged it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_87#Supermassive_black_...
Quanta magazine is a glorified university press release and marketing shop for Simons associated institutions. Take it with a grain of salt, and know for sure its leaving out a huge range of scientists views.
--1-- Charlotte Mason (not, so far as I can tell, affiliated with or funded by the Simons Foundation)
of the Cosmic Dawn Center (not, so far as I can tell, affiliated with or funded by the Simons Foundation)
which is associated with the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen (not, so far as I can tell, affiliated with or funded by the Simons Foundation, except that the NBI hosts something called the "Niels Bohr International Academy" that has taken money from the Simons Foundation; it doesn't look to me as if Charlotte Mason has any connection with this)
and also with the National Space Institute at the Technical University of Denmark (not, so far as I can tell, affiliated with or funded by the Simons Foundation)
--2-- The James Webb Space Telescope (not, so far as I can tell, affiliated with or funded by the Simons Foundation)
--3-- Jenny Greene (not, so far as I can tell, affiliated with or funded by the Simons Foundation, though she did once give a talk at the Center For Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute which is part of the Simons Foundation)
of Princeton University (not, so far as I can tell, affiliated with the Simons Foundation though I expect it's taken some of their money, but in any case no one needs an excuse for reporting on work done at Princeton)
--4-- Unnamed-in-the-article researchers who found that a "little red dot" is likely a supermassive black hole without stars around it; the Simons Foundation is not mentioned anywhere in the paper they published about this; neither the first-named author of that paper nor the one quoted in the linked article has obvious Simons connections, and both are at the University of Cambridge which, again, no one needs an excuse for reporting on the doings of.
--5-- Rachel Sommerville of the Flatiron Institute. Here there really is a Simons connection; the Flatiron Institute is part of the Simons Foundation. It does computational research in scientific fields, astrophysics being one of them.
--6-- "a meeting in April 2026 in Helsingør, Denmark" about the early universe; this was titled "Charting Cosmic Dawn in Copenhagen" and so far as I can tell has no Simons connection other than the fact that two of the 21 people listed as "invited speakers and tutorial leads" are from the Flatiron Institute, which seems innocuous since the F.I. does in fact do scientific research in this area.
--7-- Hakim Atek (no Simons connection so far as I can see)
of the Paris Institute of Astrophysics (no Simons connection so far as I can see, though I did find evidence that at least once the Simons Foundation has provided funding for a person working there)
of the Sorbonne University (not affiliated with the Simons Foundation; I'm sure they sometimes take S.F. money but, yet again, this is not an institution that anyone needs excuses to report on the work of)
So, I find one, count 'em, one, instance of a Simons-associated entity in the article. How very sinister of Quanta to mention them and hide their own affiliation. Oh, wait: "Editor’s note: The Flatiron Institute is funded by the Simons Foundation, which also funds this editorially independent magazine. Simons Foundation funding decisions have no influence on our coverage."
You may, of course, choose not to believe that last claim. You might be right. But in this article I don't see any obvious sign of bias; they reported on a whole lot of things most of which have no particular connections with the Simons Foundation, and the one S.F.-affiliated thing they reported on does seem relevant. I can't rule out the possibility that Sommerville's work is actually bad and was reported on here only because of the Simons connection, but e.g. she is one of those invited contributors to that conference in Copenhagen which doesn't seem to have had a Simons connection and does seem to have been run by reputable astrophysicists.
That’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?
I vouched for your two posts in this thread, but that never works, and honestly it gets a little old trying to pick up the slack left by HN's inscrutable, unaccountable, and largely-broken filter. This has been happening a lot lately, unfortunately.