Forgive me for being off topic, but I must say how astonished and happy I am that Soundgarden's nonsense song title from 1994 now is a real science concept:
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."
stronglikedan · 8h ago
It can be expected and still be exciting.
Cthulhu_ · 2h ago
Yeah, "expected" is the scientific theory, JWST's observations are the evidence, or at least help refine the theory and come up with new ones.
booleandilemma · 3h ago
I'm guessing dylan604 is a manager of some sort.
"I discovered a new element!"
"It's expected we'd find a new one eventually. Now get back to work"
ErigmolCt · 3h ago
JWST isn't just living up to the hype, it's redefining the field
api · 8h ago
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.
jraines · 6h ago
This PBS Spacetime video pours some cold water on the black holes as dark matter hypothesis:
It’s 4 years old; I don’t know if this JWST finding changes anything. I do know we have finally found some (one?) intermediate-mass black holes in the interim, but I don’t know if that changes it either.
The possibility it leaves open for “Planck relics” is interestingly exotic
How many other "known" things in astronomy are actually something else entirely when you throw better instruments at them
sigmoid10 · 1h ago
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.
voxleone · 12h ago
Upon reading the title, I would have expected some gravitational redshift to be part of the explanation, which made me wonder—are we sure none of that deep gravity well effect is contributing to the redness? That said, I understand the community tends to favor AGN-related causes: rapid Doppler broadening of emission lines, infrared dust reprocessing, and cosmological redshift seem to account for most of what’s observed.
andrewflnr · 6h ago
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.
jordanb · 6h ago
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.
dylan604 · 11h ago
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.
voxleone · 11h ago
Fair point — I don't think gravitational redshift was completely ignored, but perhaps it was ruled out early and not discussed in the public-facing article. In most astrophysical observations, especially with JWST, cosmological redshift and AGN mechanisms usually dominate the interpretation, but I agree: when something challenges conventional thinking, even “obvious” effects deserve a clear mention or elimination.
devmor · 9h ago
I think your comment/complaint is indicative of something I've mused about for a while in regards to science articles - I wish there were a level of common scientific publication somewhere between "novice" and "expert".
I don't need it explained to me like I'm five, but I would like it explained to me like I'm a curious student who's taken a course or two on the subject.
emmelaich · 7h ago
Agree, but it's probably covered by Quanta magazine, Ars Technica, plus 3b1b, veritasium, vsauce, etc.
andrewflnr · 6h ago
Veritasium is definitely more at the beginner level. I'm not terribly familiar with Vsauce but my impression is that he's even more mass-market. On YouTube, PBS Spacetime tries to be mass-market but ends up requiring some background knowledge, for better or worse. :D
devmor · 5h ago
Ars occasionally does have articles at that level! But it's just a couple regular contributors on their specific subjects of expertise.
I'd really like to see a whole magazine (or website) dedicated to it, one day.
vivzkestrel · 6h ago
I wish we could have faster than light travel by compressing space somehow, go to these 50 billion light years away objects and actually verify if they are a galaxy or not. Even if you could insta teleport to every object, I think it would still take an infinite amount of time to visit every star, every galaxy and every planet for just 10 seconds
analog31 · 6h ago
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.
wewewedxfgdf · 6h 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.
griffzhowl · 37m ago
Not 50 billion years ago because the universe is only about 13.8 billion years old as of current thinking. Space has been expanding in the time it's taken light to travel so "light years away = time ago light was emitted" gets increasingly wrong at longer distances
mosesbp · 11h ago
Making progress on these key issues in galaxy evolution and black hole growth is exactly the kind of research that will not happen (or at minimum be extremely limited) under the current administration’s grant cancellations, funding cuts,
and staffing reductions at the NSF and NASA, the two of which account for almost all of US astronomy research funding.
Hammershaft · 10h ago
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.
dylan604 · 8h ago
How is studying a black hole going to make the rich richer? If it's not, then it's not worth doing. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out. All of you poors should be less concerned about make believe spacey stuff, and figure out how to give more of your money to the rich.
I wish I was joking
TheOtherHobbes · 2h ago
Why is it getting hotter? Why has my house been washed away? Why did my kids die of measles?
God's will, I suppose. Best donate more to my megachurch.
abakker · 7h ago
Well, the idea was that it requires rockets and that SpaceX would get the contracts...but they even F'd that up.
ErigmolCt · 3h ago
We're finally at the point where instruments like JWST can answer decade-old questions
https://youtu.be/3mbBbFH9fAg?si=cnB-WVsE9OLuF-GK
said no more counting dollars, we’ll be counting stars
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgT0N3tMP74&pp=ygUJI3JpcGV0a...
This list doesn't even include the red dots: https://www.astronomy.com/science/the-10-greatest-jwst-disco...
"I discovered a new element!"
"It's expected we'd find a new one eventually. Now get back to work"
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.
https://youtu.be/qy8MdewY_TY?si=9jc_a7IAm4qrhfNX
It’s 4 years old; I don’t know if this JWST finding changes anything. I do know we have finally found some (one?) intermediate-mass black holes in the interim, but I don’t know if that changes it either.
The possibility it leaves open for “Planck relics” is interestingly exotic
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hole_Sun
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Black+Sun+by+Isamu+Noguchi...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aeWyp2vXxqA
But honestly I'd guess that the light is emitted too far from the horizon to be redshifted very much by the black hole.
But no in this case these objects are red even in comparison to nearby objects.
I don't need it explained to me like I'm five, but I would like it explained to me like I'm a curious student who's taken a course or two on the subject.
I'd really like to see a whole magazine (or website) dedicated to it, one day.
I wish I was joking
God's will, I suppose. Best donate more to my megachurch.