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Astronomers puzzled by little red galaxies that seem impossibly dense
- riidom 2y agohttps://archive.is/NhWAs https://archive.is/NhWAs
- sesm 2y agoCan those be just globular clusters in their 'bright' phase? Globular clusters are not even mentioned in that article, which is weird.
- ceejayoz 2y agoI'm gonna guess that the prominent astronomers at several top-notch universities mentioned have heard of globular clusters, and that the reason it's not mentioned is it's not relevant.
- nilkn 2y ago[flagged]
- ceejayoz 2y ago> Either you don't know (why reply at all?) Because, as a lay person, I’ve heard of globular clusters, and that means several experts in the field not talking about them points not to “weird”, but to “nope”.
- nilkn 2y agoI don't contest the answer "nope" (in fact, I provided an explanation) -- I contest your decision to prioritize snark over helpfulness.
- ceejayoz 2y agoI mainly take issue with the “weird” designation, as if every science article must somehow explain everything unrelated the phenomenon isn’t. Anyone with JWST time slots knows what a globular cluster is. If they say it’s weird and unexplained, it probably is at present.
- hollerith 2y agoIs this level of tone policing helpful on net, though?
- nilkn 2y agoIn my estimation, yes. I'd like to see replies here focus on helpfulness and knowledge sharing. You are certainly free to disagree.
- hollerith 2y agoOK, even though the comment that you think is too snarky does not bother me, I will take this conversation to mean that I should use a stricter standard than merely "would not bother me" to which to hold my own comments. The comment at which the snark was direct is a bad comment (the writer does not know enough about astronomy to make any weird feeling he has about an astronomy article to be the least bit informative) but I'll downvote comments like that rather than try to defend snarky replies to them.
- ProAm 2y agoI'll say on HN I do appreciate that. This is one of the last bastions of good conversations on the net. We all try to do our best to keep it that way, and one of the methods is to call out comments as such. Just my opinion but I appreciate it, snarky or not we just want good conversation even if its among dissenting opinions.
- airstrike 2y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. > Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. > Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. > Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. Basically everyone is wrong here
- deleted 2y ago
- at_a_remove 2y agoIt certainly could be helpful, as it is a reminder that the people making the observations also have functioning brains and, being more expert in the topic than the naive querent, would most likely have already considered the obvious. After some contemplation of the rather mild rebuke, the querent might ask better questions, or at least refrain from asking bad ones. Many folks on HN, when encountering non-"tech" articles in the sciences, have a somewhat distressing habit of plunging toward assumptions which suggest that the people in the article have failed to look for the obvious and/or are decades behind in what the subjects know. This is especially sorrowful, because who among us hasn't suffered through someone asking us, in our specialty, "Why don't you just hit the EASY button? It's around here somewhere! You're making this sound hard!"
- jvanderbot 2y agoBoth are wrong. A more unassuming way of phrasing it would be "how did they rule out X", and of course the better response is to take the most generous interpretation and provide and informative response to the spirit of that generous interpretation.
- ordu 2y ago> Is that level of snark necessary or helpful to anyone? I think a far more valuable and helpful response would be to point out why these are not globular clusters. Either you don't know (why reply at all?), or you deliberately chose to withhold that (again: why reply at all?). I agree with you, that the explanation why that can't be globular clusters would be much more helpful, but if one wants to get it, they'd better do not say things like "globular clusters are not even mentioned in that article, which is weird." People see such statements and answer to them. When you're asking a question you need to be focused on your question, a little slip can lead to results exactly as we see. If I was asking that question, I would mention my disappointment with the lack of mention of globular clusters, but I wouldn't call the article weird because of this, I'd rather mention my limited knowledge of astronomy and my curiosity and my hunger for knowledge, and I make it clear that these are the reasons of my disappointment, not the bad work of the authors of the article.
- fch42 2y agoIt's unfortunate that during "professional development" we collectively appear to unlearn saying "no". Or, more widely, learn to avoid using simple direct language. It's not limited to scientists :-(
- somenameforme 2y agoI think it's because the implication of any such question is how/why did they exclude.... It's like when you ask somebody, did you have a nice day? If they respond "yes" or "no", that's breaking the unstated rules of conversation. And I would add that perceived competence does not preclude elementary solutions or problems. We're all humans, and humans are entirely prone to silliness, regardless of our credentials. NASA lost a near billion dollar Mars orbiter [1] because nobody, of the thousands of highly credentialed people that worked on that project, bothered to ask, 'Did anybody make sure that all components are using the same measurement system (metric vs customary), run a sim, or at least sanity check the data we're getting back?' Because surprisingly, the answer there would have been "no." [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter
- blueflow 2y agoWhy? How do the astronomers know that its many stars, how did they rule out its the normal amount but brighter?
- ceejayoz 2y agoWhich aspect of the answer do you want? You can write a textbook on such a broad question; how we determine the mass of a galaxy, its composition, its distance, etc. JWST is seeing brand new things; globular clusters are so well documented as to be part of the original Messier catalog that predates the United States.
- blueflow 2y agoThe answer is not rocket science. JWST saw something, scientists made an interpretation, there should be an explanation "why" somewhere. And you won't need to write a textbook on that because you can cite prior work.
- ceejayoz 2y agoThere is no solid/proven explanation right now. Only hypotheses to be tested. It’s a new phenomenon they’re working to understand.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- stevenrj 2y agoAssuming that all their light is coming from stars, they have far too much stellar mass (with stellar masses similar to the Milky Way) to be the progenitors of today's globular clusters.
- sesm 2y agoIn globular clusters stars tend to have similar age in terms of main sequence progression. If most of the stars approach their brightest phase, the cluster will be extremely bright relative to its mass.
- m3kw9 2y agoMust be heck of a night sky on one of those planets
- andrewflnr 2y agoThey might be too early for planets, at least rocky ones. I'm not exactly sure of the timeline for these stars, but planets require at least a generation or two of stars and novas to fuse heavy elements, and we're probably looking at some of the earliest stars formed (assuming it they are actually stars, not entirely clear yet). Also, if they're not sure how the stars themselves can survive being so close to each other, stable planetary orbits are probably right out. :D
- andoando 2y agoMan isn't that just so freaking cool. Matter comes together forms some kind of mechanical system to produce new materials which come together and form a new system and so on. Some how a few principles which all matter follows gets reproduced again and again at higher and higher scales. Is there a fun/good read on astronomy?
- andrewstuart 2y agoI wonder how close we are talking. "close" in astronomical terms tends to be rather a long way away,
- nacho-daddy 2y agoIs this what a group of type III civilizations look like on the Kardashev scale? Back when the universe was hot and dense and it was still fun?
- tux3 2y agoWell, the universe is very heterogeneous, you see. There's still plenty of hot, dense, and fun to go around, you just have to look in the right places!
- pavlov 2y ago“Red galaxies? On a Friday night? They’re so hot and dense and full of obnoxious Level III civilizations, nobody goes there anymore.”
- eru 2y agoColder is actually better and more fun. You see, the theoretical lower limit for how much energy your super-computer takes to run is given by temperature, and thus on a larger scale by the temperature of the background radiation in your part of the cosmos. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle
- uoaei 2y agooccam's razor says probably not
- postalrat 2y agoSays who? Have you considered the alternatives?
- jajko 2y agoMaybe that's another Great filter in Drake's equation - civilizations dumb enough to go full scale in crypto mining and 'AI' to generate cute cat pictures with nobody to stop for a second and think a bit. Those last few tokens will take half of universe's energy to mine, lets hope we are on the other side.
- montjoy 2y ago> it was missing other key features seen with black holes, such as X-rays and radio waves. There were also other features, such as a peak in the light’s brightness at certain frequencies, that suggested it came from stars Amateur speculation: A dense group of stars tightly circling an early forming supermassive black hole? The stars would be able to (mostly) block the radio and x-rays.
- consp 2y agoSpace is big, really big, even if it looks small. I doubt you would be able to block enough but that is just armchair guessing. Things like reemission might also help?
- denderson 2y ago“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.” — Douglas Adams
- Nuenki 2y agoI hope this quote has made its way into the academic literature in some way.
- moi2388 2y ago“Unlock this article” Please stop linking to paywalls ffs.
- original_idea 2y agoarchive.ps or whatever the domain is now.
- r721 2y agoArchive.today is the master domain which should redirect to the best one for one's location: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today
- jamiek88 2y agoHow does that work?
- MathMonkeyMan 2y agoPlug: I made <https://waybackinator.com/ https://waybackinator.com/>. You can just append a URL to the URL path to get a link to the most recent archive snapshot, if there is one. It uses the wayback machine's API. Example: 1. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2445967-astronomers-puzzled-by-little-red-galaxies-that-seem-impossibly-dense/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2445967-astronomers-puz... 2. https://waybackinator.com/https://www.newscientist.com/article/2445967-astronomers-puzzled-by-little-red-galaxies-that-seem-impossibly-dense/ https://waybackinator.com/https://www.newscientist.com/artic... 3. "That URL is not available via the internet archive API." Oh well.
- jwilk 2y agoIf it's just for The Wayback Machine, you can prepend https://web.archive.org/web/ https://web.archive.org/web/ to the URL; no need for the waybackinator indirection.
- anon56237526 2y ago
- wizardforhire 2y agoMy personal hope is that they’re white holes that have been heavily red shifted… probably gonna be something way less exciting but none the less interesting.
- Keysh 2y agoThe preprint version of the main paper being discussed: https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2408.07745 https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2408.07745
- pfdietz 2y ago"We stress, however, that the canonical interpretation of AGNs causing the broad Hβ lines also remains viable."
- le-mark 2y agoWhat’s the layperson’s interpretation of this?
- pfdietz 2y agoThey have offered an interesting hypothesis (all those stars packed into a small space) but this other, perhaps more conventional, explanation for the observations is not ruled out.
- jfengel 2y agoThey're trying to figure out how fast the galaxy is rotating by looking at the redshift from the stars. Some are moving towards us and others away. That spreads out the distinctive frequency of hydrogen emissions. They think it's broader than the conventional explanation (active galactic nuclei) can explain. But it can't be ruled out.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]