5 ms·

Webb telescope spots super old, massive galaxies

kokanee 4y ago
This is fairly sensationalized, I think. "The researchers still need more data to confirm that these galaxies are as large, and date as far back in time, as they appear... 'Another possibility is that these things are a different kind of weird object, such as faint quasars'."
- kuu 4y ago
  "such as faint quasars, which would be just as interesting" If you're going to quote, I would suggest to do it fully.
- geuis 4y ago
  And quasars are, if I remember correctly, just galaxies whose central black holes are ingesting large amounts of gas. The accretion disks that form in orbit are simply massive and form giant light years long jets that shoot out from both poles. Active galactic nucleus.
  - willis936 4y ago
    Not all SMBHs have to be AGNs. We expect there to be primordial black holes of many different sizes prior to galaxy formation.
DemocracyFTW2 4y ago
the comma in the title made me read that as headlinese "Webb telescope['s] spots [are] super old, [also, there are] galaxies that shouldn't exist"
- MarcoZavala 4y ago
  [dead]
scrozier 4y ago
HN reader spots extraneous, comma that shouldn't exist in the headline :-)
- doodlesdev 4y ago
  Original title had "massive" as an adjective to galaxies which explains the comma, HN sometimes removes these "superlative" words from the title creating this kind of nonsense.
  - ruuda 4y ago
    Hah, but galaxies are one of the few things where "massive" in the original sense of the word is appropriate. The article is about galaxies that are more massive than expected.
    - tough 4y ago
      The bots wouldn't know
  - tomashubelbauer 4y ago
    Hands down my least favorite feature of Hacker News. Maybe I'd change my mind if it wasn't on and I had to endure all of the clickbaity and superlative ridden headlines but right now I feel like the confusion this creates is much more annoying than the nasty original headlines it is protecting us from.
    - criddell 4y ago
      I've always wondered why headlines are limited to 80 chars but comment lines on wide screens aren't wrapped until > 200 characters.
    - rootusrootus 4y ago
      I think it's overall a good feature, but I'd prefer that it were voluntary. Have HN show you the original headline and the proposed modifications, and let the submitter adjust as necessary.
SaintSeiya84 4y ago
Because the universe did not originated in a Big Bang, that's just a theory that is becoming more and more disproved. The universe is infinite and eternal, in constant change? sure, but in no way it started 13500 million years ago.
- coliveira 4y ago
  In fact it makes little sense to talk about time before the big bang, because inside a singularity time moves infinitely slow. So the point is that, yes, the universe never really started because time didn't exist before the singularity. The universe only evolved to a different dimension, so to speak, and time as we know started to exist when the big bang occurred.
  - _0w8t 4y ago
    The question about existence of time before singularity does not have an answer, rather than affirmative no. A singularity means that all timelines goes through it, but it is impossible to make continues extension of the timelines past the singularity in the current physical models. That literally means that anything is possible with the timeline prior that. The timeline can jump, be replaced by a set of random points, became a multidimensional surface, go back etc. It may even indeed disappear, but we do not know.
- simonh 4y ago
  Some thing can't become more disproved, either it's disproved or it isn't. The timeline is certainly up for grabs, there are uncertainties in the various ways we measure or infer distances and the age of objects, but so far nothing that invalidates the overall scheme. Roger Penrose's idea of conformal cyclic cosmology is a plausible alternative, but even that still has an event in our past that looks an awful lot like a big bang. There are just too many observations any alternative theory needs to explain, like galactic red shift and the cosmic background radiation. If stars are infinitely old, how come they still have any hydrogen left? It's always a good idea to keep an open mind though. What are the alternatives you think have legs?
sqeaky 4y ago
I see a few possible takeaways from this. Maybe, these results are weird and might be in error somehow. Maybe, these results are more data that we have big gaps in our understanding of cosmology. Maybe massive headlines should be double checked.
stirbot 4y ago
(assuming our model of the universe is correct and complete)
- beebeepka 4y ago
  No, no. The model is pretty accurate. Just add more dark stuff and stir until it matches our expectations!
  - CuteDinosaur 4y ago
    It is good to think about, maybe the dark stuff are the cause of these "early" galaxies.
    - nblgbg 4y ago
      That means bing bang happened long back and some our theories are wrong ! May be there is no dark matter !
  - uoaei 4y ago
    For the laypeople: dark matter is literally defined as "the gap between our existing model and the data we've collected". It is not a model, it is merely an acknowledgment of a lack of one (see: the vagueness of the name "dark matter"). There have been proposed models for why this occurs (WIMPs, etc.) but none have been convincing from a scientific perspective, mainly due to the inherent lack of observations which can justify such models.
- detourdog 4y ago
  Yes, I thought the words “shouldn’t exist” is the wrong term for this phenomenon.
  - nawgz 4y ago
    Isn't it pretty clear it means "shouldn't exist [under current models]"?
ViscountOfKent 4y ago
Wow...way to shame the JWST for having old spots colorado.edu
anigbrowl 4y ago
Without endorsing this particular conjecture, it's encouraging that JWST is generating so much interesting data so soon and leading to lots of theoretical re-evaluation. Astronomy and HEP may seem pretty abstract and pointless to non-nerds, but techniques developed for the collection and analysis of such vast datasets find their way back into more quotidian applications.
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  Every time a new expensive instrument like this is proposed, someone asks: “what will it find?” We don’t know. That’s point of building it!
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    You need to bear in mind that some people do not care about knowledge for its own sake, only that which can be instrumentalized. So their response to the discovery of new cosmic facts is not that they're cool but 'what does that have to do with me?' To them, it's just nerds geeking out over stuff for its own sake instead of solving useful problems like ending hunger or making better consumer appliances or the like. You could think of it as a sort of techno-myopia.
    - andrepd 4y ago
      Right, but even that argument is flawed, because real world applications often come out of unexpected theoretical research.
    - tablespoon 4y ago
      > You could think of it as a sort of techno-myopia. Or, more accurately, you can think about it as a different set of priorities. For instance, someone might want to spend a ten billion dollars of tax money to survey all the ball pits across the world, and accurately count the number of balls in each at precisely the same moment, just to have that knowledge "for its own sake." Is it myopic not to care about that? A lot of people meet some of their needs for mysticism and meaning with astronomy, but it's also perfectly valid not to use it that way, and instead see it as blurry pictures of places that aren't even theoretically possible to interact with in any way.
mabbo 4y ago
I need to temper my excitement. What Webb is seeing is some red dots. We didn't expect to see those red dots (not so red, not so big, etc) but they're there. One interpretation is that these are older (more red shifted), larger (more stars) galaxies. But that's just one explanation. A pretty good one, but still, it could also be something totally mundane and boring. Remember FTL neutrinos? I'll be ecstatic if the existing model of the universe needs a massive update based on this new data. But it's important to search as hard as we can for answers that aren't the one we really want to see.
- joe__f 4y ago
  It's much more reasonable to think about changing the cosmological or galaxy formational models than it is to consider adding FTL neutrinos. I remember thinking the FTL neutrinos were nonsense as soon as I saw it. You're right that this could be explained differently given time, but it at least seems plausible to me that it could be real.
shazeubaa 4y ago
What if the universe was much older?
- ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
  Low probability, as in 10^-43%: we know pretty much the story that happened after the first 10^-43 seconds [1], and we know the universe became transparent after circa 300,000 years post Big Bang. The oldest known galaxy was GN-z11, ~400 milion years post Big Bang, by JWST the oldest is JADES-GS-z13-0, ~325 million years post Big Bang. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_early_universe#Grand_unification_epoch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_early_universe...
  - hypertele-Xii 4y ago
    Seems incredible hubris to think we can reverse-calculate to 14 billion years ago with sub-second accuracy when science can't even predict if it'll rain tomorrow.
    - ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
      Seems incredible hubris we can write 4 equations [1] and control some kind of switches at 10^-8 meters to multiply matrices and handle decision-making with sub-second (10^-9) accuracy in the "real world" of objects beyond 10^-3 meters. Science can predict if it will rain tomorrow: "[a] seven-day forecast can accurately predict the weather about 80 percent of the time and a five-day forecast can accurately predict the weather approximately 90 percent of the time." [2] Feel free to hubristically read articles such as Cosmic Evolution of Viscous QCD Epoch in Causal Eckart Frame [3] and tell us all where they are wrong. An introductory article into cosmology and inflationary theory [4]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_equations#Macroscopic_formulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_equations#Macrosco... [2] https://scijinks.gov/forecast-reliability https://scijinks.gov/forecast-reliability [3] https://inspirehep.net/files/b54851f57716f3e8fb650bc1c057ba15 https://inspirehep.net/files/b54851f57716f3e8fb650bc1c057ba1... [4] https://cds.cern.ch/record/1059055/files/p197.pdf https://cds.cern.ch/record/1059055/files/p197.pdf
bastardoperator 4y ago
Not sure if the pictures on the article are from the telescope but the first thing that came to mind was QR codes.
ars 4y ago
We need a new look at cosmological redshift. It bugs me tremendously because it violates conservation of basically everything (energy, momentum, angular momentum). I find the entire thing extremely unphysical because of that. Why should just this one thing violate that? Just photons, nothing else? Are gravitational waves also stretched? Why can't we duplicate the effect in a lab?
- BurnGpuBurn 4y ago
  Funny thing is you can make spectrum shifts with electricity. But since the current cosmological model doesn't allow for much electricity in space (and we should ask why) they can not explain it any other way than it being a Doppler shift.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
blatant303 4y ago
Physical and Mathematical Consistency of the Janus Cosmological Mode (Jean-Pierre Petit, Gilles D’Agostini, and Nathalie Debergh) > in 2008 and 2009, Hossenfelder in [17] and [18] builds her own bimetric model involving negative mass, from a Lagrangian derivation where she produces a system of two coupled field equations. [...] Actually, although sharing many similarities, having the same kind of coupled field equations regarding negative mass, a fundamental difference remains between Hossenfelder’s bimetric theory and the Janus Cosmological Model. > Indeed, Hossenfelder doubts that the second entity can have an important effect on the distribution of standard matter, qualifying the gravitational coupling between the two species as “extremely weak”. This is because “for symmetry reason” she considers that the absolute values of the mass density of the two populations should be of the same order of magnitude. Such hypothesis leads to a global zero field configuration, which does not fit with observations, as she notices. Then, examination of possible fluctuations seems to be her main concern. Not perceiving that a profound dissymmetry is on the contrary the key to the interpretation of many phenomena, including the acceleration of the cosmic expansion, she will not develop her model further during the following decade, focusing instead on other research topics. > Nonetheless, Hossenfelder points out a “smoking gun signal” that could highlight the existence of invisible negative mass in the universe, through the detection of diffracted light rays caused by diverging lensing, an effect previously predicted in [13]. We indeed showed from 1995 that photons emitted by high redshift galaxies (z > 7) are diffracted by the presence of invisible conglomerates of negative mass on their path. This reduces the apparent magnitude of such galaxies, making them appear as dwarf, which is consistent with observations. > Another feature of the scenario becomes clear from the pre- viously discussed example of the Schwarzschild metric. If there was a localized source of negative energy, it would act as a gravitational lens - but unlike usual matter this would be a diverging lens since it would repel our (usual) photons. Such a lensing event would typically lower the luminosity of the source, an effect that could potentially add up over distance if the distribution of such sources is substantial. The detection of a diffractive lensing event could serve as a smoking gun signal for the here proposed scenario. Source: http://www.ptep-online.com/2019/PP-56-09.PDF http://www.ptep-online.com/2019/PP-56-09.PDF -- A Bi-Metric Theory with Exchange Symmetry (Sabine Hossenfelder) > Another feature of the scenario becomes clear from the previously discussed example of the Schwarzschild metric. If there was a localized source of negative energy, it would act as a gravitational lens - but unlike usual matter this would be a diverging lens since it would repel our (usual) photons. Such a lensing event would typically lower the luminosity of the source, an effect that could potentially add up over distance if the distribution of such sources is substantial. The detection of a diffractive lensing event could serve as a smoking gun signal for the here proposed scenario. Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/0807.2838.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/0807.2838.pdf -- On the concept of apparent mass in two-sided/bi-metric universes: https://januscosmologicalmodel.com/negativemass#conjugatecurvatures https://januscosmologicalmodel.com/negativemass#conjugatecur... -- From last week's thread about black holes without a singularity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34817326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34817326
bmitc 4y ago
I admit that I was damned surprised that the JWT launched and deployed correctly, but I am glad it did. It's helping usher in a new wave of data, and helping to remind people that science is as much finding out how you're wrong as it is finding out if you're right. Once LISA comes on board, we'll have nice new toys to explore the past with. > that shouldn’t exist Articles should be more careful. It isn't that much longer to say "that aren't predicted by current models".
- willis936 4y ago
  Not at all. Astrophysics is one of those dogma heavy fields. We have such a limited set of observations on what is such a large space. Every data point we collect will be from within the solar system. Given this, the mainstream astrophysicists should be humble and open to better models. They are not. https://youtu.be/Fqfap3v0xxw https://youtu.be/Fqfap3v0xxw
- thiht 4y ago
  > Once LISA comes on board For those like me who don't know what LISA is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Interferometer_Space_Antenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Interferometer_Space_Ant... Seems like an amazing project
dave333 4y ago
As predicted by Mills https://brilliantlightpower.com/wp-content/uploads/theory/TheoryPresentationPt3-web-032017.pdf https://brilliantlightpower.com/wp-content/uploads/theory/Th... slide 42
ericbarrett 4y ago
Perhaps we've finally seen curvature in the universe? E.g. k != 0 as explained by Susskind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpFRJ4g3S0M#t=36m30s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpFRJ4g3S0M#t=36m30s
luxuryballs 4y ago
I always find it perplexing how shocked they claim to be when they find something that may indicate they were wrong, is this some kind of insane ego driven lack of self awareness? Of course we’re going to be more wrong than right about freakin space.
- icapybara 4y ago
  They all know this is how science works. It's nonetheless surprising. They're not shocked that they're wrong, they're shocked about what this could imply about the universe.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

This is fairly sensationalized, I think. "The researchers still need more data to confirm that these galaxies are as large, and date as far back in time, as they appear... 'Another possibility is that these things are a different kind of weird object, such as faint quasars'."

kuu 4y ago
"such as faint quasars, which would be just as interesting" If you're going to quote, I would suggest to do it fully.
geuis 4y ago
And quasars are, if I remember correctly, just galaxies whose central black holes are ingesting large amounts of gas. The accretion disks that form in orbit are simply massive and form giant light years long jets that shoot out from both poles. Active galactic nucleus.
- willis936 4y ago
  Not all SMBHs have to be AGNs. We expect there to be primordial black holes of many different sizes prior to galaxy formation.

DemocracyFTW2 4y ago

the comma in the title made me read that as headlinese "Webb telescope['s] spots [are] super old, [also, there are] galaxies that shouldn't exist"

MarcoZavala 4y ago
[dead]

scrozier 4y ago

HN reader spots extraneous, comma that shouldn't exist in the headline :-)

doodlesdev 4y ago
Original title had "massive" as an adjective to galaxies which explains the comma, HN sometimes removes these "superlative" words from the title creating this kind of nonsense.
- ruuda 4y ago
  Hah, but galaxies are one of the few things where "massive" in the original sense of the word is appropriate. The article is about galaxies that are more massive than expected.
  - tough 4y ago
    The bots wouldn't know
- tomashubelbauer 4y ago
  Hands down my least favorite feature of Hacker News. Maybe I'd change my mind if it wasn't on and I had to endure all of the clickbaity and superlative ridden headlines but right now I feel like the confusion this creates is much more annoying than the nasty original headlines it is protecting us from.
  - criddell 4y ago
    I've always wondered why headlines are limited to 80 chars but comment lines on wide screens aren't wrapped until > 200 characters.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    I think it's overall a good feature, but I'd prefer that it were voluntary. Have HN show you the original headline and the proposed modifications, and let the submitter adjust as necessary.

SaintSeiya84 4y ago

Because the universe did not originated in a Big Bang, that's just a theory that is becoming more and more disproved. The universe is infinite and eternal, in constant change? sure, but in no way it started 13500 million years ago.

coliveira 4y ago
In fact it makes little sense to talk about time before the big bang, because inside a singularity time moves infinitely slow. So the point is that, yes, the universe never really started because time didn't exist before the singularity. The universe only evolved to a different dimension, so to speak, and time as we know started to exist when the big bang occurred.
- _0w8t 4y ago
  The question about existence of time before singularity does not have an answer, rather than affirmative no. A singularity means that all timelines goes through it, but it is impossible to make continues extension of the timelines past the singularity in the current physical models. That literally means that anything is possible with the timeline prior that. The timeline can jump, be replaced by a set of random points, became a multidimensional surface, go back etc. It may even indeed disappear, but we do not know.
simonh 4y ago
Some thing can't become more disproved, either it's disproved or it isn't. The timeline is certainly up for grabs, there are uncertainties in the various ways we measure or infer distances and the age of objects, but so far nothing that invalidates the overall scheme. Roger Penrose's idea of conformal cyclic cosmology is a plausible alternative, but even that still has an event in our past that looks an awful lot like a big bang. There are just too many observations any alternative theory needs to explain, like galactic red shift and the cosmic background radiation. If stars are infinitely old, how come they still have any hydrogen left? It's always a good idea to keep an open mind though. What are the alternatives you think have legs?

sqeaky 4y ago

I see a few possible takeaways from this. Maybe, these results are weird and might be in error somehow. Maybe, these results are more data that we have big gaps in our understanding of cosmology. Maybe massive headlines should be double checked.

stirbot 4y ago

(assuming our model of the universe is correct and complete)

beebeepka 4y ago
No, no. The model is pretty accurate. Just add more dark stuff and stir until it matches our expectations!
- CuteDinosaur 4y ago
  It is good to think about, maybe the dark stuff are the cause of these "early" galaxies.
  - nblgbg 4y ago
    That means bing bang happened long back and some our theories are wrong ! May be there is no dark matter !
- uoaei 4y ago
  For the laypeople: dark matter is literally defined as "the gap between our existing model and the data we've collected". It is not a model, it is merely an acknowledgment of a lack of one (see: the vagueness of the name "dark matter"). There have been proposed models for why this occurs (WIMPs, etc.) but none have been convincing from a scientific perspective, mainly due to the inherent lack of observations which can justify such models.
detourdog 4y ago
Yes, I thought the words “shouldn’t exist” is the wrong term for this phenomenon.
- nawgz 4y ago
  Isn't it pretty clear it means "shouldn't exist [under current models]"?

ViscountOfKent 4y ago

Wow...way to shame the JWST for having old spots colorado.edu

anigbrowl 4y ago

Without endorsing this particular conjecture, it's encouraging that JWST is generating so much interesting data so soon and leading to lots of theoretical re-evaluation. Astronomy and HEP may seem pretty abstract and pointless to non-nerds, but techniques developed for the collection and analysis of such vast datasets find their way back into more quotidian applications.

jiggawatts 4y ago
Every time a new expensive instrument like this is proposed, someone asks: “what will it find?” We don’t know. That’s point of building it!
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  You need to bear in mind that some people do not care about knowledge for its own sake, only that which can be instrumentalized. So their response to the discovery of new cosmic facts is not that they're cool but 'what does that have to do with me?' To them, it's just nerds geeking out over stuff for its own sake instead of solving useful problems like ending hunger or making better consumer appliances or the like. You could think of it as a sort of techno-myopia.
  - andrepd 4y ago
    Right, but even that argument is flawed, because real world applications often come out of unexpected theoretical research.
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    > You could think of it as a sort of techno-myopia. Or, more accurately, you can think about it as a different set of priorities. For instance, someone might want to spend a ten billion dollars of tax money to survey all the ball pits across the world, and accurately count the number of balls in each at precisely the same moment, just to have that knowledge "for its own sake." Is it myopic not to care about that? A lot of people meet some of their needs for mysticism and meaning with astronomy, but it's also perfectly valid not to use it that way, and instead see it as blurry pictures of places that aren't even theoretically possible to interact with in any way.

mabbo 4y ago

I need to temper my excitement. What Webb is seeing is some red dots. We didn't expect to see those red dots (not so red, not so big, etc) but they're there. One interpretation is that these are older (more red shifted), larger (more stars) galaxies. But that's just one explanation. A pretty good one, but still, it could also be something totally mundane and boring. Remember FTL neutrinos? I'll be ecstatic if the existing model of the universe needs a massive update based on this new data. But it's important to search as hard as we can for answers that aren't the one we really want to see.

joe__f 4y ago
It's much more reasonable to think about changing the cosmological or galaxy formational models than it is to consider adding FTL neutrinos. I remember thinking the FTL neutrinos were nonsense as soon as I saw it. You're right that this could be explained differently given time, but it at least seems plausible to me that it could be real.

shazeubaa 4y ago

What if the universe was much older?

ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
Low probability, as in 10^-43%: we know pretty much the story that happened after the first 10^-43 seconds [1], and we know the universe became transparent after circa 300,000 years post Big Bang. The oldest known galaxy was GN-z11, ~400 milion years post Big Bang, by JWST the oldest is JADES-GS-z13-0, ~325 million years post Big Bang. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_early_universe#Grand_unification_epoch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_early_universe...
- hypertele-Xii 4y ago
  Seems incredible hubris to think we can reverse-calculate to 14 billion years ago with sub-second accuracy when science can't even predict if it'll rain tomorrow.
  - ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
    Seems incredible hubris we can write 4 equations [1] and control some kind of switches at 10^-8 meters to multiply matrices and handle decision-making with sub-second (10^-9) accuracy in the "real world" of objects beyond 10^-3 meters. Science can predict if it will rain tomorrow: "[a] seven-day forecast can accurately predict the weather about 80 percent of the time and a five-day forecast can accurately predict the weather approximately 90 percent of the time." [2] Feel free to hubristically read articles such as Cosmic Evolution of Viscous QCD Epoch in Causal Eckart Frame [3] and tell us all where they are wrong. An introductory article into cosmology and inflationary theory [4]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_equations#Macroscopic_formulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_equations#Macrosco... [2] https://scijinks.gov/forecast-reliability https://scijinks.gov/forecast-reliability [3] https://inspirehep.net/files/b54851f57716f3e8fb650bc1c057ba15 https://inspirehep.net/files/b54851f57716f3e8fb650bc1c057ba1... [4] https://cds.cern.ch/record/1059055/files/p197.pdf https://cds.cern.ch/record/1059055/files/p197.pdf

bastardoperator 4y ago

Not sure if the pictures on the article are from the telescope but the first thing that came to mind was QR codes.

ars 4y ago

We need a new look at cosmological redshift. It bugs me tremendously because it violates conservation of basically everything (energy, momentum, angular momentum). I find the entire thing extremely unphysical because of that. Why should just this one thing violate that? Just photons, nothing else? Are gravitational waves also stretched? Why can't we duplicate the effect in a lab?

BurnGpuBurn 4y ago
Funny thing is you can make spectrum shifts with electricity. But since the current cosmological model doesn't allow for much electricity in space (and we should ask why) they can not explain it any other way than it being a Doppler shift.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

blatant303 4y ago

Physical and Mathematical Consistency of the Janus Cosmological Mode (Jean-Pierre Petit, Gilles D’Agostini, and Nathalie Debergh) > in 2008 and 2009, Hossenfelder in [17] and [18] builds her own bimetric model involving negative mass, from a Lagrangian derivation where she produces a system of two coupled field equations. [...] Actually, although sharing many similarities, having the same kind of coupled field equations regarding negative mass, a fundamental difference remains between Hossenfelder’s bimetric theory and the Janus Cosmological Model. > Indeed, Hossenfelder doubts that the second entity can have an important effect on the distribution of standard matter, qualifying the gravitational coupling between the two species as “extremely weak”. This is because “for symmetry reason” she considers that the absolute values of the mass density of the two populations should be of the same order of magnitude. Such hypothesis leads to a global zero field configuration, which does not fit with observations, as she notices. Then, examination of possible fluctuations seems to be her main concern. Not perceiving that a profound dissymmetry is on the contrary the key to the interpretation of many phenomena, including the acceleration of the cosmic expansion, she will not develop her model further during the following decade, focusing instead on other research topics. > Nonetheless, Hossenfelder points out a “smoking gun signal” that could highlight the existence of invisible negative mass in the universe, through the detection of diffracted light rays caused by diverging lensing, an effect previously predicted in [13]. We indeed showed from 1995 that photons emitted by high redshift galaxies (z > 7) are diffracted by the presence of invisible conglomerates of negative mass on their path. This reduces the apparent magnitude of such galaxies, making them appear as dwarf, which is consistent with observations. > Another feature of the scenario becomes clear from the pre- viously discussed example of the Schwarzschild metric. If there was a localized source of negative energy, it would act as a gravitational lens - but unlike usual matter this would be a diverging lens since it would repel our (usual) photons. Such a lensing event would typically lower the luminosity of the source, an effect that could potentially add up over distance if the distribution of such sources is substantial. The detection of a diffractive lensing event could serve as a smoking gun signal for the here proposed scenario. Source: http://www.ptep-online.com/2019/PP-56-09.PDF http://www.ptep-online.com/2019/PP-56-09.PDF -- A Bi-Metric Theory with Exchange Symmetry (Sabine Hossenfelder) > Another feature of the scenario becomes clear from the previously discussed example of the Schwarzschild metric. If there was a localized source of negative energy, it would act as a gravitational lens - but unlike usual matter this would be a diverging lens since it would repel our (usual) photons. Such a lensing event would typically lower the luminosity of the source, an effect that could potentially add up over distance if the distribution of such sources is substantial. The detection of a diffractive lensing event could serve as a smoking gun signal for the here proposed scenario. Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/0807.2838.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/0807.2838.pdf -- On the concept of apparent mass in two-sided/bi-metric universes: https://januscosmologicalmodel.com/negativemass#conjugatecurvatures https://januscosmologicalmodel.com/negativemass#conjugatecur... -- From last week's thread about black holes without a singularity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34817326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34817326

bmitc 4y ago

I admit that I was damned surprised that the JWT launched and deployed correctly, but I am glad it did. It's helping usher in a new wave of data, and helping to remind people that science is as much finding out how you're wrong as it is finding out if you're right. Once LISA comes on board, we'll have nice new toys to explore the past with. > that shouldn’t exist Articles should be more careful. It isn't that much longer to say "that aren't predicted by current models".

willis936 4y ago
Not at all. Astrophysics is one of those dogma heavy fields. We have such a limited set of observations on what is such a large space. Every data point we collect will be from within the solar system. Given this, the mainstream astrophysicists should be humble and open to better models. They are not. https://youtu.be/Fqfap3v0xxw https://youtu.be/Fqfap3v0xxw
thiht 4y ago
> Once LISA comes on board For those like me who don't know what LISA is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Interferometer_Space_Antenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Interferometer_Space_Ant... Seems like an amazing project

dave333 4y ago

As predicted by Mills https://brilliantlightpower.com/wp-content/uploads/theory/TheoryPresentationPt3-web-032017.pdf https://brilliantlightpower.com/wp-content/uploads/theory/Th... slide 42

ericbarrett 4y ago

Perhaps we've finally seen curvature in the universe? E.g. k != 0 as explained by Susskind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpFRJ4g3S0M#t=36m30s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpFRJ4g3S0M#t=36m30s

luxuryballs 4y ago

I always find it perplexing how shocked they claim to be when they find something that may indicate they were wrong, is this some kind of insane ego driven lack of self awareness? Of course we’re going to be more wrong than right about freakin space.

icapybara 4y ago
They all know this is how science works. It's nonetheless surprising. They're not shocked that they're wrong, they're shocked about what this could imply about the universe.

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