4 ms·

Anyone else think this is a huge non-story? Like, of course there's going to be oxygen in distant galaxies. Why wouldn't there be? It would be far more interest

• messe 2y ago
  > Why wouldn't there be? Because the light we're seeing from this galaxy is from only 300 million years after the big bang. Elements like oxygen primarily form in supernovae, and the abundance of oxygen and other heavy elements in this extremely young galaxy is ten times higher than expected.
• simiones 2y ago
  Based on our current models, it takes a long amount of time for elements as heavy as oxygen to be formed, especially in large enough quantities that it can be detected. And when looking at a very distant galaxy, what we're seeing is an image of how it looked like very early in its lifetime. So, the expectation based on certain models was that oxygen would not have yet formed at the time in the history of the universe when this image left towards us. The expectation is indeed that all galaxies will have more or less the exact same elements that we have at ~13 billion years of age. But the image here is from a galaxy that was, at the time the image was emitted towards us, much younger than that.
• fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
  From the article: >Galaxies usually start their lives full of young stars, which are made mostly of light elements like hydrogen and helium. As stars evolve, they create heavier elements like oxygen, which get dispersed through their host galaxy after they die. Researchers had thought that, at 300 million years old, the Universe was still too young to have galaxies ripe with heavy elements. However, the two ALMA studies indicate JADES-GS-z14-0 has about 10 times more heavy elements than expected. I didn't know this so I also wasn't surprised by the headline. Although it seems from this quote that they also did expect oxygen to be there, just not as much as they determined to be there. Although I have almost zero interest in space so perhaps this is bigger than I understand. I only clicked on the article because oxygen seems like a pretty simple compound to me and was surprised by the headline. I also think the headline is somewhat misleading due to the point above and how distant the galaxy is isn't the actual the newsworthy point as you say. It is only relevant to the extent that light from distant galaxies reaches earth slower. The real headline should be something like "more oxygen than expected is created in young galaxies" which is indeed one of those space articles I would never click on.
  • bgirard 2y ago
    > more oxygen than expected is created in young galaxies Or we have fundamental errors in measuring distances and ages of things which is leading to these unexpected observations.
    • rsynnott 2y ago
      Which would actually be a bigger deal than a bit of unexpected oxygen, I think; at that point you’re probably kicking the sides of general relativity.
  • SoftTalker 2y ago
    I'm no astronomer but I believe that the first stars tended to be huge and short-lived. Is it surprising that there would have been supernova and heavy elements ejected from them that early?
    • Hikikomori 2y ago
      Surprising in the sense that they have models and predictions putting out some number and this new measurement showed that they're not exactly correct. Could almost say business as usual when it comes to science like this.
    • losteric 2y ago
      We expected heavy elements from supernova. It’s surprising that there is 10x more heavy elements than expected. Were there more supernova? Bigger ones? Are we missing other pieces of the picture?
      • SkyBelow 2y ago
        Is a single order of magnitude within a reasonable range of error for the calculation? Some cases that is a massive miss, but other cases that might be within the expected statistical range. In the former cases it implies something entirely missing, while the latter cases are more likely to be known uncertainties which can now be better refined.
• jmyeet 2y ago
  No, it's a big deal. The oxygen existed ~300 million years after the Big Bang. So what has to happen is hydrogen and helium have to coalesce into galaxy and into nebulae, some event probably has to trigger star formation and the stars created have to be really large. To put this in persepctive, our Sun, which is larger than the median star, produces no oxygen and is ~4.5 billion years old. Larger stars are theorized to undergo the so-called CNO cycle [1]. To get to this process after "only" 300 million years means the star or stars are truly massive. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNO_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNO_cycle
  • pixl97 2y ago
    Along with the first stars being massive the JWST is showing giant quasars with mostly gas around them which may not quite confirm direct collapse black holes, but it is pointing in that direction very strongly.
• drakonka 2y ago
  It seems like you could apply similar thinking to aliens, but if we actually got proof of aliens it'd still be a big deal, right?
  • baxtr 2y ago
    Have you not seen the NJ UFO videos of late? Just like oxygen, they're here
    • mh- 2y ago
      No, but I've seen a _lot_ of videos from people who don't know what aircraft look like at night. And a handful of off-the-shelf drones, probably flying around in response to the first group of videos.
  • saurabh 2y ago
    There is no way we are alone in this universe, what would really be a big deal though is if there are somehow able to traverse light years to reach us.
    • weard_beard 2y ago
      Spooky.
• Isamu 2y ago
  We can reframe the story as: oldest galaxy currently found is much more evolved than expected. We expected something more primitive.
• qoez 2y ago
  In my eyes even finding life is semi a non-story. Or like obviously there's going to be life even intelligent life since it spawned here. Any idea that we're unique is silly we're just emergent phenomena of initial conditions.
  • itishappy 2y ago
    Perhaps more interesting that we haven't found life!
  • verisimi 2y ago
    As one emergent phenomena of initial conditions to another, allow me to say 'hi'. Hi.
• mcculley 2y ago
  Those of us who read the article think otherwise.
• tshaddox 2y ago
  I'd say the same thing for biological life, but it'll still be newsworthy when we discover it the first time.
• reverendsteveii 2y ago
  The headline is a non-story. Us being wrong about how we thought galaxies form is, in fact, an interesting story. From the article: "The results show the galaxy has formed very rapidly and is also maturing rapidly, adding to a growing body of evidence that the formation of galaxies happens much faster than was expected."
  • JoeAltmaier 2y ago
    An earlier story posted here, discussed the presence of water around a most distant supernova remnant. The gas surrounding the star had been fused by the shockwave into an expanding sphere of nearly uniform oxygen which then combined with the remaining hydrogen to produce an enormous volume of damp air. Just a few molecules per cubic meter or less. Estimated at ten trillion times the entire volume of water on earth. Seemed like a lot at the time. So that was early oxygen. But atypical.
• PaulHoule 2y ago
  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_population
• xandrius 2y ago
  Everything is a non-story once it comes out. Even the obvious things have to be proven or we would never really know.
• nimish 2y ago
  A lot of modern science is just fishing for funding to keep running a big machine at something then having the ordained priests interpret the output Instead of inventing something interesting like "we're able to scan the elemental composition of every galaxy within a radius within seconds" i.e. solve the problem rather than create useless papers and PR.
  • sho_hn 2y ago
    The problem with building the factory for the Model T of galaxy scanners is the limited customer audience.
    • nimish 2y ago
      So? The whole point of academia is that they aren't bound by customers. Except that's been subverted by having to kowtow to funding agencies and universities most concerned with accruing and distributing money. Defeating the whole point of having them in the first place! Free and open markets are far more efficient at distributing and allocating capital.
      • MattPalmer1086 2y ago
        You are confusing academia with science. A lot of science is done in academia, but a lot is also done in the commercial sector. Obviously the commercial sector won't typically fund things unless there is some probable payback, so they are not so good at doing fundamental research. You need both to get the best returns.
        • nimish 2y ago
          I'm explicitly not. And you have no idea how much fundamental research happens in the commercial sector because there's no incentive to publish it -- why would I publish the trade secrets for you to exploit? For the record, work I've done under NDA would easily disprove a number of academic theories right now but there's no way I could get the companies to allow me to publish it (nor would I want to tank their stock). Furthermore, academia doesn't do research unless there's a payback either in papers or prestige. What academia are you thinking of that allows for the pure pursuit of whatever's interesting?
• metalman 2y ago
  Honestly, yes, but only very briefly, as "most distant known galaxy" should show as a very odd beast indeed with the signatures for the lightest elements only, but what is hanging is that there may be even heavier elements, as the search was to detect just oxygen, confirming that, but discussing nothing else.
• interludead 2y ago
  It's not just about finding oxygen... it's about finding it this early in the universe's history
• vl 2y ago
  It tells us that our cosmological models are wrong, which in turn tells us that we don’t understand fundamental physics principles models are built on, and this is a big deal.