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JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe

quantamagazine.org

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Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe

#81

Post by lucasban »

javajosh wrote: post #78
vagab0nd wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it was a game mechanic I'd call it a cunning way to impose internally consistent limits on what the player can know. But if you assume it's a multi-player game, wouldn't it be easier to implement a global space-time? The reality is that you have to keep an internal clock for each player.

In practice you need a global coordinate system. For example, you'd create a "spawn point" for all players, and then, before the game starts, move them to their starting positions at a fraction of c. The game is still keeping track of units within this initial coordinate system, and transform those coordinates for the player. The reverse is done for player decisions. There is effectively an in-game "star network" tha…

I’d play this

Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe

#82

Post by mr_toad »

deanCommie wrote: post #26
somat wrote: post #21

So this is one of them "shower thoughts", you know, those stupid things you think about while working on something else.That is, purely science fiction. Can an analog be drawn between galaxies and solar system creation theories, with several orders of magnitudes in time required for formation due to scale difference. That is, the galaxies we see with their billions of stars are actually young proto accretion disks. w…

I'm here for shower thoughts-driven discourse. But I missed the point. Stars eventually wind up as black holes. So it stands to reason so would galaxies. But then why would they be all over the early universe?

> But then why would they be all over the early universe?

Stars can form quite quickly (relative to the age of the universe), possibly as early as 150 million years after the Big Bang. And the earliest massive stars would have had very short lifespans.

Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe

#83

Post by brunoqc »

jackmott42 wrote: post #77
hattmall wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean it really depends on your personal experience to how your perspective or "where we are now" feels. It's not like everyone is even remotely concerned with or benefitting from this "advancement." A lot of the so called progress has done nothing but destroyed and distort an enjoyable and peaceful existence.

I guess we might be better off if Pol Pot had killed more smart people than he did. Maybe Trump will win and finish off the rest of us and you can be happy. We dill die fighting though, good luck

> We dill die fighting though

I agree for the rest but will we? The planet is burning and we don't do shit.

Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe

#84

Post by kragen »

cooper_ganglia wrote: post #47
somat wrote: post #21

So this is one of them "shower thoughts", you know, those stupid things you think about while working on something else.That is, purely science fiction. Can an analog be drawn between galaxies and solar system creation theories, with several orders of magnitudes in time required for formation due to scale difference. That is, the galaxies we see with their billions of stars are actually young proto accretion disks. w…

[flagged]

please elucidate which part, if any, of this is correct

Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe

#85

Post by mr_toad »

vagab0nd wrote: post #29
javajosh wrote: post #3

This is super cool. I think it's funny how Quanta writes, "It is expected because JWST was built, in part, to find the ancient objects." "Ancient" is equivalent to "distant" because of special relativity. It's an odd thing, astronomy - it's a real world time-traveling observation, except we're limited in resolution and we can't look here only there . If it was a game mechanic I'd call it a cunning way to impose inter…

> If it was a game mechanic I'd call it a cunning way to impose internally consistent limits on what the player can know. But if you assume it's a multi-player game, wouldn't it be easier to implement a global space-time? The reality is that you have to keep an internal clock for each player.

> The reality is that you have to keep an internal clock for each player.

You can transform between two players clocks easily enough. Time is just another coordinate to maintain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation

Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe

#86

Post by empyrrhicist »

dotnet00 wrote: post #62
mabbo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really worthwhile to compare it to the hubble in that regard. Pre-hubble, the question was whether the universe would contract into a big crunch, expand slower and slower forever, or balance out somehow in the middle. Then hubble got a good look at universal expansion and we noticed it was speeding up and now we've got Lambda-CDM from that. From this we know what the long term fate of the universe is. That there…

Heat death is one of the possibilities, but it's still very much an open question, as it depends on the curvature of the universe and the nature of dark energy.

I'll take heat death over the big rip. Don't forget vacuum collapse though...

Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe

#87

Post by steve_adams_86 »

brunoqc wrote: post #83
jackmott42 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess we might be better off if Pol Pot had killed more smart people than he did. Maybe Trump will win and finish off the rest of us and you can be happy. We dill die fighting though, good luck

> We dill die fighting though I agree for the rest but will we? The planet is burning and we don't do shit.

What do you mean? We're solving the world's problems, one opinion on the internet at a time.

Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe

#88

Post by Laremere »

somat wrote: post #21

So this is one of them "shower thoughts", you know, those stupid things you think about while working on something else.That is, purely science fiction. Can an analog be drawn between galaxies and solar system creation theories, with several orders of magnitudes in time required for formation due to scale difference. That is, the galaxies we see with their billions of stars are actually young proto accretion disks. w…

Not an astronomer, but there's at least one important thing to consider:

Stars form in denser regions of gas. However once they grow large enough to start fusion, the solar wind will blow away the gas, halting growth of that star system. So stars have a kind of limit when it comes to size.

That's what makes these early universe large black holes problematic (read, exciting new science): we know black holes the mass of stars can form by a super nova. However the only way we know that these super massive black holes can form is by smaller black merging. There's simply not enough time for black holes as large as we think jwst has seen to form in the age of the universe we think we're looking at. Something in the physics has to give.

Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe

#90

Post by marcus_holmes »

> Over the course of a year, Chandra stared at the cosmic lens for two weeks — one of its longest observation campaigns yet — and collected 19 X-ray photons coming from a galaxy called UHZ1, at a redshift of 10.1. Those 19 high-octane photons most likely came from a growing black hole that existed fewer than half a billion years after the Big Bang, making it by far the most distant X-ray source ever detected.

This blew my tiny mind.

19 photons over 2 weeks. That's such a tiny amount of light. How are we able to conclude anything from such tiny amounts of light? (I'm not disputing that we can, it just blows my mind that we can).

And those photons - 13+ billion years speeding through space, all that vast empty time and distance, to end up hitting a detector during those two weeks when doing so will change the way we think about the universe. And of course the photon itself hasn't experienced any of that time. For the photon, it was all the same moment.

Also blows my mind that any time I'm standing outside I'm being hit by photons that have been traveling for billions of years to reach that point. Of course they're overwhelmed by photons from the Sun, but still. Some photon left a sun billions of years ago, sped through the universe for all that time, and ended up hitting my retina. And I don't even realise when this happens.

I understand why theists don't like science. How can your puny god compare to shit like this?

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