Early universe's 'little red dots' may be black hole stars

Sounds like it's working as expected. It would have sucked if it started working and saw nothing new. I really like how the headlines have just become "JWST discovers something new. Again."

JWST isn't just living up to the hype, it's redefining the field

My favorite is that there are probably primordial black holes, which is exciting because they are a good dark matter candidate. They could have other neat implications too, like being common enough that we might some day find one within visiting range. Being able to examine one directly could allow us to “finish physics.”

Note that many if not most variations on the Big Bang and inflation predict them but we have yet to directly see them. What JWST has found is indirect evidence they’re out there.

Did SoundGarden have it right in 1994 (author misheard a news report, apparently)? /s

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hole_Sun

I was extremely disappointed that they didn't choose "...may be black hole suns" for the title.

I came here to say more or less the same thing. Also, it's hard to believe that that track was from 1994. Gosh, I'm getting old.

Just went from poetic to prophetic

I was happy that OneRepublic’s song sounds like the perfect anthem for open source development on GitHub of ambitious projects:

said no more counting dollars, we’ll be counting stars

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgT0N3tMP74&pp=ygUJI3JpcGV0a...

Turns out the music video is a documentary film from 12.8 billion years ago.

If these little red dots are actually black hole stars pumping out massive energy in the early universe, that kind of supports the idea

That text does not deserve the title "theory".

"The Blowtorch Theory: A new model for structure formation in the universe" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44115973

No. That was a collection of vague ideas from an amateur. To do cosmology you have to be able to build mathematical models.

The redshift in the early universe is actually why the JWST is an infrared telescope. Hubble was limited to higher wavelengths and couldn't see objects that were excessively redshifted.

But no in this case these objects are red even in comparison to nearby objects.

There's already a ton of redshift from the universe expanding, so they're definitely correcting their spectra for some amount of redshift. I'd love to know if there's a way to tell the two sources of redshift apart, or if significant redshift from climbing away from the hole just makes it look a smidge farther away.

But honestly I'd guess that the light is emitted too far from the horizon to be redshifted very much by the black hole.

I'm no astronomer trying to have work published, but wouldn't a mistake like that be one of the most obvious things to attempt to test your own work against before releasing the results? Is the fear of releasing an obvious mistake and the damage to one's reputation just not present anymore, or is first to publish so critical that mistakes are forgiven? To me, if I was going to present a paper that goes against existing conventional thinking, I'd want to make sure my paper stood up to the most rigorous review including (especially?) from HN commenters.

That's not an astronomy thing, that's a general science thing. Everything is just an educated guess until we build something to study it in more detail. And when we confirm or disprove something, we can make new guesses using the added info.

I predict that if faster than light travel is possible, we will have it within our lifetimes, perhaps even as soon as 20 years ago.

You can't get there because you can't out run the growth of space itself and even if you got there, whatever it was you came to see was there at last 50 billion years ago and wouldn't look the same, or possibly no longer exist.

It's just depressing. Such a moronic & self sabotaging policy. I'd say people should look at the evidence on the returns from NSH & NSF funding but if people cared about basing policy on evidence we wouldn't be here in the first place.

We're finally at the point where instruments like JWST can answer decade-old questions