6 ms·

Astrophysicists Puzzle over Webb’s New Universe

213 points by jnord 4mo ago

dvh 4mo ago
Only two things are infinite: the cosmos, and a web designer’s obsession with discovering new ways to break scrolling.
- CrzyLngPwd 4mo ago
  And no one can be sure about the cosmos :-p
- beng-nl 4mo ago
  And we’re not sure about the cosmos.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- deadbabe 4mo ago
  "Virgil led Dante into the next layer of hell, past the lecherers, the murderers, the thieves... 'And here,' he said 'is where we keep the web designers who break scrolling'"
jdw64 4mo ago
As observations become too numerous, it seems like it can be summarized as there now being too many possible candidate explanations. As data increases and becomes clearer, more and more things don't fit the existing theories. What are the current theories explaining the early universe? What happened to the Big Bang? I only studied astronomy up to an undergraduate level, so I don't really know. I imagine that various non-uniform gases were scattered around, and due to spatial distortions, those uniform gas regions clumped together, forming stars and other structures. Perhaps the expansion of space wasn't uniform either—it expanded unevenly, sometimes bulging, and when space expands or contracts, energy is generated, causing spacetime changes to shake the field, and that shaking might have created matter. Maybe the dynamic interaction between changing spacetime and fields revealed the energy stored in the field in the form of particles. What do scientists think about this in modern cosmology? My knowledge is far too limited and I lack intuition, but reading science-related articles always excites me. Maybe it's because I still have some childlike curiosity left in me
- jvs76 4mo ago
  I dont think about it because my days are occupied by very specific problems. Theory of Bounded Rationality and its implications apply.
  - jdw64 4mo ago
    Right. When you don't have any breathing room, it's hard to think about anything else. That's why I take about two hours a day to just watch the news and clear my head. I'd probably forget all about it too if I were working 70-hour weeks on a contracted project, haha. Hang in there. Have a good day
- tigerlily 4mo ago
  I took a good long look at the CMB picture, including the caption. It basically says the Universe was one big hot apparently uniform ball at one stage. I don't know what conditions were like before that stage, but like Eric Idle says, nothing can come from nothing. Dark energy is a horse shit name for a theory that was horse shit to begin with. The Universe is probably just inhomogeneous, like your intuition is saying.
  - tigerlily 4mo ago
    I will say that the current and future telescope lineup is amazing and is bound to reveal: even more fascinating insights and mysteries!
  - mr_mitm 4mo ago
    Why do you say "probably"? We can measure and quantify the inhomogeneities very precisely, and they're tiny. This isn't a matter of opinion or intuition.
    - tigerlily 4mo ago
      Oh, sorry I was referring to the cosmological principle [1]. The wiki page is actually quite a good summary of the whole fiasco. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle
gbjcantab 4mo ago
This is one of my favorite phenomena: again in again, across various fields of study, breakthroughs in discovery allow us to go from relative ignorance to a level of knowledge and understanding that enables clear and clean conceptual models; then, as we learn even more, we realize how much more complex and weird and multifaceted reality really is. It’s like a Dunning-Kruger effect on a field-wide scale, but in a good way. Rather than an example of hubris, it’s an opportunity for awe.
- qsera 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - sdoering 4mo ago
    WTF. We have such great medical advancement in cancer treatments, vaccines, reconstructive surgery h just to name a few. Not sure what you are referring to, but the only unjustifiable things in the (so called) medical field are snake oil sales men trying to make a quick buck by instilling a fear of science into people's minds. Like anti-vax idiots. Or homeopathic bullshit.
    - juanani 4mo ago
      [dead]
    - qsera 4mo ago
      [flagged]
- paytonjjones 4mo ago
  I think this can be explained by the dictum "big effects get discovered first" It does present a weird science communication problem. After the first generation, scientists are all focused on "little effects" and don't get excited about talking about the big effects any more. They like talking about what they're working on (little effects). Textbooks drift from fundamentals and new entrants and outsiders get a distorted view of reality.
phyzix5761 4mo ago
> Faced with observations of early black holes and galaxies that weren’t expected to exist, scientists have come up with a wealth of new theories to explain them. Now they just need to figure out which ones are true. This subtitle really bothers me. Science isn't about finding out what is true. Science is about finding out what is false and building models to explain the rest. We can never confidently say we know something to be true because that closes the door for future science to disprove our beliefs and that's exactly the purpose of science. The best we can do is come up with increasingly more useful models accepting that in the end all models are wrong but different models are useful for different purposes.
- Tanath 4mo ago
  Hypotheses are made for a reason though. Science is still about finding what's true, and ruling out what's not is part of the process/method for doing so. Sometimes all the alternatives to the truth are ruled out and we know the truth. Scientific revolutions happen sometimes, but they still need to explain everything the old theories explained. The newer theories may still be wrong, but in different and hopefully fewer ways. It's important to keep the scope of what's been demonstrated/tested in mind to not be misled about what truths have been established. Newton's physics is still largely true within the scope of everyday experience, for example.
- johngossman 4mo ago
  I think you are confusing the scientific process, in particular Popper's falsification principle, with science's purpose, which is to find the truth, or at least sort things into true and false. It's a bit like saying the purpose of programming is to have a bunch of unit tests.
  - somenameforme 4mo ago
    He's saying that what is believed to be the truth at one point in time often ends up being false from another point in time. And this is inescapable since we never know as much as we think we do. In the late 19th century it was believed that physics was basically done, and all that remained was refinement to ever more decimal points. Then came along the early 20th century when quantum mechanics and relativity completely revolutionized the field and largely overturned stuff that had been believed to be true for centuries. Science can do a decent job of disproving a hypothesis because even a single contradiction should be enough to suffice in good science, but it's far less efficient at proving anything true even if it seems to always be true. For instance mathematical relationship describing the gravitational attraction between large bodies seemed to always work, but it turns out it was merely a rough approximation that completely fails in various cases such as when one body has a particularly large gravitational pull, or when very high relative velocities are present. And even modern understanding is, at best, another rough approximation because we can already see endless examples in the cosmos of examples that defy current understanding and require further refinements in a direction that's currently unknown. --- Basically at any point in history if you look at the bleeding edge science from a century before, it looks naive in many ways. In each era people always think they have finally moved beyond this, but we never have and it's entirely possible we never will since it's likely this universe has surprises awaiting us that we can't even yet imagine. Think about how utterly bizarre it is that time itself is a relative variable meaning with tech capable of reaching sufficiently high velocities you can literally travel into the future, relative to people at rest (such as all of Earth for example). It's nonsense, but it's completely real.
6thbit 4mo ago
That’s a beautiful article showcasing our predicament in having access to more information about the universe. Now i have to be the one to ask the dumb defensive question: what makes us so certain that we can trust what we see on James Webb? Can we definitely discard a measurement problem?
- neffy 4mo ago
  Some of the Hubble results were also raising questions. At the same time, I read one of the papers on the galaxy stuff, and what struck me was they were identifying galaxy shapes by counting the pixels each galaxy had, so there are definitely some question marks over how they do some of this.
  - tetris11 4mo ago
    You would expect more background pixel fuzz when centering an image kernel over an artefact. In Hubble, that fuzz was marked. With Webb, far less so. I think these are real true positives
- scotty79 4mo ago
  > what makes us so certain that we can trust what we see on James Webb? We can trust what we see. We can't trust there's nothing where we don't see anything.
- astro1234 4mo ago
  Not a dumb defensive question but you should know the nice thing about these experiments is the incredible amount of work that goes into calibration and understanding all error signals. Messing up the data analysis has major precedents. If you aren't familiar you should look into BICEP data in 2014, they thought they had observed primordial gravitational waves which would have been earth shattering. Instead they just messed up the dust correction pipeline. I don't envy the day they came to that realization. I was in several conference rooms at Princeton where BICEP people presented their analysis and David Spergel (of WMAP, previous head of the department at princeton) and others were able to walk them through how they thought they had kind of messed things up. This is what routinely happens, ESPECIALLY when something unexpected is observed. Every possible explanation is looked into, and ESPECIALLY in cosmology, you can do that incredibly well. Cosmology is one of the most beautiful sciences in my experience, precisely because we have such good ways to model the observations to probe various models, and you can treat the observations with Bayesian stats with virtually no risk of misspecifying your model, or, if you do find its misspecified, you have discovered something new about the universe. The process to go from raw observations to physics, correcting for all the crap in between early universe light and us (dust which also rotates light polarization -- this explained the BICEP issue, instrument systematics which are measured to incredible precision on the ground (e.g. point spread function -- what is the detector response to various intensities of light; e.g. you get electrons for bright sources that spill into neighboring pixels) Everyone everywhere is looking to make a name for themselves by discovering the discrepancy -- be it a screwup of some other team (astro community is generally very supportive and positive but also competitive) or a problem with simulation assumptions, a genuine discrepancy in our understanding of the universe (i.e. the tension in the hubble constant -- you infer rate of expansion from cosmic background radiation / early universe observations, and then try it using an alternative method -- using local variable stars, and you get a statistically significant difference). So I would say: if there's a screwup it will be found, and a genuine fuckup is possible and does happen, but when it does believe me we will know usually within a few months. You'll have a ton of people trying to reproduce the results, pouring over everything there is that could possibly explain these observations. The wheel of astrophysics grinds slowly but it grinds finely. Edit: also shoutout to Jenny Greene -- one of the world's foremost experts on galactic astronomy and also a genuinely great person. She rented me her house for a summer for dirt cheap when I was a poor grad student with nowhere to stay. Also hosted the best graduate student parties (our idea of a party is beer and board games and complaining about our advisers)
wanda 4mo ago
You won't make it to the next iteration without wrapping yourself in a black hole and appearing as an anomaly to future observers.
- delichon 4mo ago
  How do we know whether we're already in one?
  - wanda 4mo ago
    A downside to the tech. You never really know if you made it because you enter another universe within. You make it to the next cycle, but within a new universe rather than the one you aimed for. Your black hole displaces spacetime within the universe whose cycle renewed, but you are no longer an active component of that universe. Of course, if you didn't deliberately do this, I guess you're a spectator to someone else in their black hole. So, congrats, I guess, but also you need to advance your science a bit faster if you don't want to count on luck next time.
api 4mo ago
The most exciting idea to me that JWST has bolstered is primordial black holes. Many models already predict them but JWST has provided the first good indirect evidence in the form of too-early galaxies. The models that predict PBHs predict that. If they exist, they would not be constrained to stellar mass and above. There could be a population of little black holes floating around. Anything under the mass of a decent size asteroid would have evaporated by now but anything that mass and above would still exist. They are a dark matter candidate, and one that doesn’t require new physics. But even if they don’t account for a significant amount of dark matter they still probably exist. The most exciting thing about PBHs is that one or more may exist in our solar system. They might have been captured over billions of years. Finding them would be incredibly challenging, especially if they are low mass, but if we did it means we could directly examine and experiment on a black hole. It could be something with the mass of a large asteroid but the size of a hydrogen atom. We could only find it by its gravitational effects. It would be utterly invisible otherwise unless it encountered matter and even then there might only be a tiny gamma ray flash, a nano accretion disc that lasts femtoseconds. We might also find smaller objects that appear to be orbiting nothing and find it that way. Directly accessing one could allow us to test theories of quantum gravity and things like string theory, and maybe more. A black hole could be like a Rosetta Stone of deep fundamental physics. The film Interstellar involved using plot magic to visit a black hole and solve physics, but this would allow it for real. It would just be an itty bitty one.
- MichaelZuo 4mo ago
  Does PBH theory also predict >1 billion solar mass black holes so early?
  - api 4mo ago
    I believe it does, due to PBHs forming seeds for early accretion, but ask a non-armchair physicist (or a good LLM).
- pmontra 4mo ago
  Of course if we had a black hole in a lab (or one in a convenient orbit) we could run all sort of experiments, but which experiments exactly? We will start by throwing things at it and watch, obviously, but that's unimaginative. What are the smart experiments?
ck2 4mo ago
Nancy Grace Roman Telescope is also going to be amazing for raising new questions and I hope the attempt to lift the Swift telescope to a higher orbit is successful if you really want to stay on top of what is breaking astrophysics in realtime, I highly recommend following DrBecky on youtube or elsewhere, she is fantastic * https://www.youtube.com/@DrBecky/videos https://www.youtube.com/@DrBecky/videos
theodorejb 4mo ago
Instead of questioning whether the Big Bang assumption is true, astrophysicists prefer to perform endless "gymnastics" to try to make the mounting contrary data fit their theory about how the universe began.
- cogman10 4mo ago
  Are you kidding? An astrophysicist that could come up with a new model that explains the current data would win a Nobel prize and earth shattering levels of notoriety. The data found doesn't contradict the big bang in any shape or form. It does challenge beliefs around black hole formation. The reason for the big bang model is because based on all our measurements of all the visible universe, it appears that everything is spreading out. Any new model needs to explain why it is the universe appears to be spreading out. There's not a scientist alive that wouldn't like to discover that "actually a fundamental principle about my field of study is completely wrong". But that takes hard work, evidence, and models which better fit than the previous ones did. You need to find something that can't be explained with the old model and can only be explained with the new model.
  - theodorejb 4mo ago
    The Big Bang is an almost infinitely malleable story, contorted to comport with almost anything we observe. But how is this useful? The predictions of this theory continually fail. The farther we look, the more we see stars, galaxies, black holes, and other structures that shouldn't exist according to this model. What if the universe doesn't have a naturalistic origin, but was created by God? How much greater would our understanding of the world be if more scientists focused on studying present phenomena rather than trying to fit stories about the past with observed data?
    - pndy 4mo ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculating_God?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculating_God?useskin=vector have fun
    - 4mo ago
swordlucky666 4mo ago
[flagged]
hyperman1 4mo ago
There was a time where Hawking's A brief history of time gave a decent overview of the universe to beginners. Does anyone know how well it holds up today and if anything better exists?
- ramraj07 4mo ago
  There was never a time when a book gave the public an overview of the universe. ABHOT was so popular for being a book no one actually read, theres even an index named after Hawking due to it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_Index Did _you_ read that book? There however definitely was a piece of media that captured public minds and educated them about the cosmos. And that was the show Cosmos. The original of course. Not the NDT drivel.
  - coliveira 4mo ago
    I did read it and I'm sure a whole generation of people also did, it is a very clear and readable book. Don't underestimate or minimize the impact of Hawking's book when it was released.
  - hyperman1 4mo ago
    I did read the book, and know enough people who did. Now I may have weird interests, but that describes basically half the inhabitants of this site. BTW, as non-USAian, I never saw Cosmos and never heard of NDT.
  - on_the_train 4mo ago
    Interesting. I've been gifted that book at just the right time in my life as a teenager. It captured me. I read it the to end many times. Not understanding everything or course. But it created a spark which laid the groundwork for my entire career. I've never seen cosmos.
  - The_Blade 4mo ago
    i will never forget learning about Eratosthenes when i was very young and should have been playing Excitebike or something
myshapeprotocol 4mo ago
[flagged]
analog31 4mo ago
So I wonder, where are these giant black holes now? There should be some closer to us than at the edge of the universe, unless something happens to them.
- tgarrett 4mo ago
  The supermassive black hole in the giant elliptical galaxy M87 is merely ~53 million light years away, close enough that we have now imaged it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_87#Supermassive_black_hole_M87* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_87#Supermassive_black_...
  - blacksmith_tb 4mo ago
    Sagittarius A* is "merely" 26 thousand light years away (but we probably won't be imaging it, since there's a lot more in the way)
    - windsurfer 4mo ago
      The M87 supermassive blackhole is thousands of times as massive as Sagittarius A*, but since Sagittarius A* is a lot closer their emission rings appear roughly the same size in the sky (42 μas vs 51 μas). Both have already been imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_Telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_Telescope
    - erulastiel 4mo ago
      We’ve already imaged it with the event horizon telescope. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittarius_A*?wprov=sfti1# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittarius_A*?wprov=sfti1#
nzeid 4mo ago
> Recent ideas suggest that little red dots could be black holes cocooned in thick gas, possibly representing a completely new type of object called a black hole star, in which the tight shroud of gas emits light like a stellar atmosphere. Just be sure to name the members of Soundgarden on the paper.
- baggachipz 4mo ago
  Would you say this research is out of... Cornell?
xqcgrek2 4mo ago
Quanta magazine is a glorified university press release and marketing shop for Simons associated institutions. Take it with a grain of salt, and know for sure its leaving out a huge range of scientists views.
- gjm11 4mo ago
  The institutions, projects and individuals named in the article are, in order of appearance: --1-- Charlotte Mason (not, so far as I can tell, affiliated with or funded by the Simons Foundation) of the Cosmic Dawn Center (not, so far as I can tell, affiliated with or funded by the Simons Foundation) which is associated with the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen (not, so far as I can tell, affiliated with or funded by the Simons Foundation, except that the NBI hosts something called the "Niels Bohr International Academy" that has taken money from the Simons Foundation; it doesn't look to me as if Charlotte Mason has any connection with this) and also with the National Space Institute at the Technical University of Denmark (not, so far as I can tell, affiliated with or funded by the Simons Foundation) --2-- The James Webb Space Telescope (not, so far as I can tell, affiliated with or funded by the Simons Foundation) --3-- Jenny Greene (not, so far as I can tell, affiliated with or funded by the Simons Foundation, though she did once give a talk at the Center For Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute which is part of the Simons Foundation) of Princeton University (not, so far as I can tell, affiliated with the Simons Foundation though I expect it's taken some of their money, but in any case no one needs an excuse for reporting on work done at Princeton) --4-- Unnamed-in-the-article researchers who found that a "little red dot" is likely a supermassive black hole without stars around it; the Simons Foundation is not mentioned anywhere in the paper they published about this; neither the first-named author of that paper nor the one quoted in the linked article has obvious Simons connections, and both are at the University of Cambridge which, again, no one needs an excuse for reporting on the doings of. --5-- Rachel Sommerville of the Flatiron Institute. Here there really is a Simons connection; the Flatiron Institute is part of the Simons Foundation. It does computational research in scientific fields, astrophysics being one of them. --6-- "a meeting in April 2026 in Helsingør, Denmark" about the early universe; this was titled "Charting Cosmic Dawn in Copenhagen" and so far as I can tell has no Simons connection other than the fact that two of the 21 people listed as "invited speakers and tutorial leads" are from the Flatiron Institute, which seems innocuous since the F.I. does in fact do scientific research in this area. --7-- Hakim Atek (no Simons connection so far as I can see) of the Paris Institute of Astrophysics (no Simons connection so far as I can see, though I did find evidence that at least once the Simons Foundation has provided funding for a person working there) of the Sorbonne University (not affiliated with the Simons Foundation; I'm sure they sometimes take S.F. money but, yet again, this is not an institution that anyone needs excuses to report on the work of) So, I find one, count 'em, one, instance of a Simons-associated entity in the article. How very sinister of Quanta to mention them and hide their own affiliation. Oh, wait: "Editor’s note: The Flatiron Institute is funded by the Simons Foundation, which also funds this editorially independent magazine. Simons Foundation funding decisions have no influence on our coverage." You may, of course, choose not to believe that last claim. You might be right. But in this article I don't see any obvious sign of bias; they reported on a whole lot of things most of which have no particular connections with the Simons Foundation, and the one S.F.-affiliated thing they reported on does seem relevant. I can't rule out the possibility that Sommerville's work is actually bad and was reported on here only because of the Simons connection, but e.g. she is one of those invited contributors to that conference in Copenhagen which doesn't seem to have had a Simons connection and does seem to have been run by reputable astrophysicists.
hparadiz 4mo ago
Little red dots are my favorite new concept in astrophysics. This idea that there could be so much matter orbiting a black hole that the matter reaches sun levels of pressure which in turn starts steller fission without there being an star. Mind-blowing
- stouset 4mo ago
  Yep, it’s a super cool concept. A black hole of a given size has a finite amount of matter that it can ingest over a period of time. Trying to stuff more matter into it causes an outward pressure from essentially the friction of the swirling mass of material falling in. This radiation pressure could in theory be great enough to start fusion as would happen in a stellar core. Also fun is that this puts a limit on the largest possible black hole we should ever see in the universe. If you assume a black hole formed a moment after matter condensed and then ingested the maximum possible from then until now, you get an upper bound for the largest possible black hole according to our current understanding of the universe. This limit is somewhere around 36 billion solar masses.
  - technotony 4mo ago
    Couldn't those large black holes merge though to get bigger ones?
    - muvlon 4mo ago
      Yes, exactly. Black hole mergers are the one thing exempt from the Eddington Limit, because there is no friction there.
  - rolph 4mo ago
    a tokomok involving a scale appropriate blackhole is a super cool concept that just came to mind
  - thecommakozzi 4mo ago
    [dead]
- 4mo ago
sulam 4mo ago
I thought I read somewhere that many of these little red dots are turning out to be nothing more than bog-standard brown dwarfs in our own galaxy that are confusing the signal. These days we have some pretty powerful agents who can read these things faster than I can, so I went and found the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04004 https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04004 It turns out that brown dwarfs are actually corrected for, so my remembrance is correct but factored in. I’m posting anyway because 1) it’s interesting and mildly relevant and 2) others might have the same “vague but unclear” recollection I had and appreciate the elaboration.
- JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
  > many of these little red dots are turning out to be nothing more than bog-standard brown dwarfs Your own paper estimates 5 to 25% may be brown dwarfs, and says nothing about whether they might be in our galaxy or not.
  - fractaled 4mo ago
    Pretty sure we can't resolve brown dwarfs farther than a few 10k ly (well inside the confines of our galaxy).
- switchbak 4mo ago
  That’s valuable: I thought the whole thing was dismissed based on the brown dwarf explanation, this is interesting that that’s not the case. It’s hard to keep up with all the news, particularly so given all the slop floating around. YouTube in particular seems to have a bunch of AI channels that just talk about this endlessly.
allcentury 4mo ago
Such a fun read, looking forward to more
HenryBemis 4mo ago
This comment will not contribute anything, and/but it is a thought that I had a few days ago, and I cannot 'shake' it. We keep 'discovering', recognising, mapping, etc. And I feel that every 'breakthrough' is "one step closer" (let's say 100 steps total), on a journey that is a thousand miles long. So, for the past 4000 years (or whichever century we can call the 'birth of astronomy'), we have accumulated 'this much' knowledge, and still we know a speck of sand in a vast desert, and perhaps now we have accelerated the rate of knowledge gathering, but still we are SO FAR.. ufff..
chickensong 4mo ago
This is almost the same article as https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-single-naked-black-hole-rewrites-the-history-of-the-universe-20250912/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-single-naked-black-hole-rew...

213 points by jnord 4mo ago

dvh 4mo ago

Only two things are infinite: the cosmos, and a web designer’s obsession with discovering new ways to break scrolling.

CrzyLngPwd 4mo ago
And no one can be sure about the cosmos :-p
beng-nl 4mo ago
And we’re not sure about the cosmos.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
deadbabe 4mo ago
"Virgil led Dante into the next layer of hell, past the lecherers, the murderers, the thieves... 'And here,' he said 'is where we keep the web designers who break scrolling'"

jdw64 4mo ago

As observations become too numerous, it seems like it can be summarized as there now being too many possible candidate explanations. As data increases and becomes clearer, more and more things don't fit the existing theories. What are the current theories explaining the early universe? What happened to the Big Bang? I only studied astronomy up to an undergraduate level, so I don't really know. I imagine that various non-uniform gases were scattered around, and due to spatial distortions, those uniform gas regions clumped together, forming stars and other structures. Perhaps the expansion of space wasn't uniform either—it expanded unevenly, sometimes bulging, and when space expands or contracts, energy is generated, causing spacetime changes to shake the field, and that shaking might have created matter. Maybe the dynamic interaction between changing spacetime and fields revealed the energy stored in the field in the form of particles. What do scientists think about this in modern cosmology? My knowledge is far too limited and I lack intuition, but reading science-related articles always excites me. Maybe it's because I still have some childlike curiosity left in me

jvs76 4mo ago
I dont think about it because my days are occupied by very specific problems. Theory of Bounded Rationality and its implications apply.
- jdw64 4mo ago
  Right. When you don't have any breathing room, it's hard to think about anything else. That's why I take about two hours a day to just watch the news and clear my head. I'd probably forget all about it too if I were working 70-hour weeks on a contracted project, haha. Hang in there. Have a good day
tigerlily 4mo ago
I took a good long look at the CMB picture, including the caption. It basically says the Universe was one big hot apparently uniform ball at one stage. I don't know what conditions were like before that stage, but like Eric Idle says, nothing can come from nothing. Dark energy is a horse shit name for a theory that was horse shit to begin with. The Universe is probably just inhomogeneous, like your intuition is saying.
- tigerlily 4mo ago
  I will say that the current and future telescope lineup is amazing and is bound to reveal: even more fascinating insights and mysteries!
- mr_mitm 4mo ago
  Why do you say "probably"? We can measure and quantify the inhomogeneities very precisely, and they're tiny. This isn't a matter of opinion or intuition.
  - tigerlily 4mo ago
    Oh, sorry I was referring to the cosmological principle [1]. The wiki page is actually quite a good summary of the whole fiasco. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle

gbjcantab 4mo ago

This is one of my favorite phenomena: again in again, across various fields of study, breakthroughs in discovery allow us to go from relative ignorance to a level of knowledge and understanding that enables clear and clean conceptual models; then, as we learn even more, we realize how much more complex and weird and multifaceted reality really is. It’s like a Dunning-Kruger effect on a field-wide scale, but in a good way. Rather than an example of hubris, it’s an opportunity for awe.

qsera 4mo ago
[flagged]
- sdoering 4mo ago
  WTF. We have such great medical advancement in cancer treatments, vaccines, reconstructive surgery h just to name a few. Not sure what you are referring to, but the only unjustifiable things in the (so called) medical field are snake oil sales men trying to make a quick buck by instilling a fear of science into people's minds. Like anti-vax idiots. Or homeopathic bullshit.
  - juanani 4mo ago
    [dead]
  - qsera 4mo ago
    [flagged]
paytonjjones 4mo ago
I think this can be explained by the dictum "big effects get discovered first" It does present a weird science communication problem. After the first generation, scientists are all focused on "little effects" and don't get excited about talking about the big effects any more. They like talking about what they're working on (little effects). Textbooks drift from fundamentals and new entrants and outsiders get a distorted view of reality.

phyzix5761 4mo ago

> Faced with observations of early black holes and galaxies that weren’t expected to exist, scientists have come up with a wealth of new theories to explain them. Now they just need to figure out which ones are true. This subtitle really bothers me. Science isn't about finding out what is true. Science is about finding out what is false and building models to explain the rest. We can never confidently say we know something to be true because that closes the door for future science to disprove our beliefs and that's exactly the purpose of science. The best we can do is come up with increasingly more useful models accepting that in the end all models are wrong but different models are useful for different purposes.

Tanath 4mo ago
Hypotheses are made for a reason though. Science is still about finding what's true, and ruling out what's not is part of the process/method for doing so. Sometimes all the alternatives to the truth are ruled out and we know the truth. Scientific revolutions happen sometimes, but they still need to explain everything the old theories explained. The newer theories may still be wrong, but in different and hopefully fewer ways. It's important to keep the scope of what's been demonstrated/tested in mind to not be misled about what truths have been established. Newton's physics is still largely true within the scope of everyday experience, for example.
johngossman 4mo ago
I think you are confusing the scientific process, in particular Popper's falsification principle, with science's purpose, which is to find the truth, or at least sort things into true and false. It's a bit like saying the purpose of programming is to have a bunch of unit tests.
- somenameforme 4mo ago
  He's saying that what is believed to be the truth at one point in time often ends up being false from another point in time. And this is inescapable since we never know as much as we think we do. In the late 19th century it was believed that physics was basically done, and all that remained was refinement to ever more decimal points. Then came along the early 20th century when quantum mechanics and relativity completely revolutionized the field and largely overturned stuff that had been believed to be true for centuries. Science can do a decent job of disproving a hypothesis because even a single contradiction should be enough to suffice in good science, but it's far less efficient at proving anything true even if it seems to always be true. For instance mathematical relationship describing the gravitational attraction between large bodies seemed to always work, but it turns out it was merely a rough approximation that completely fails in various cases such as when one body has a particularly large gravitational pull, or when very high relative velocities are present. And even modern understanding is, at best, another rough approximation because we can already see endless examples in the cosmos of examples that defy current understanding and require further refinements in a direction that's currently unknown. --- Basically at any point in history if you look at the bleeding edge science from a century before, it looks naive in many ways. In each era people always think they have finally moved beyond this, but we never have and it's entirely possible we never will since it's likely this universe has surprises awaiting us that we can't even yet imagine. Think about how utterly bizarre it is that time itself is a relative variable meaning with tech capable of reaching sufficiently high velocities you can literally travel into the future, relative to people at rest (such as all of Earth for example). It's nonsense, but it's completely real.

6thbit 4mo ago

That’s a beautiful article showcasing our predicament in having access to more information about the universe. Now i have to be the one to ask the dumb defensive question: what makes us so certain that we can trust what we see on James Webb? Can we definitely discard a measurement problem?

neffy 4mo ago
Some of the Hubble results were also raising questions. At the same time, I read one of the papers on the galaxy stuff, and what struck me was they were identifying galaxy shapes by counting the pixels each galaxy had, so there are definitely some question marks over how they do some of this.
- tetris11 4mo ago
  You would expect more background pixel fuzz when centering an image kernel over an artefact. In Hubble, that fuzz was marked. With Webb, far less so. I think these are real true positives
scotty79 4mo ago
> what makes us so certain that we can trust what we see on James Webb? We can trust what we see. We can't trust there's nothing where we don't see anything.
astro1234 4mo ago
Not a dumb defensive question but you should know the nice thing about these experiments is the incredible amount of work that goes into calibration and understanding all error signals. Messing up the data analysis has major precedents. If you aren't familiar you should look into BICEP data in 2014, they thought they had observed primordial gravitational waves which would have been earth shattering. Instead they just messed up the dust correction pipeline. I don't envy the day they came to that realization. I was in several conference rooms at Princeton where BICEP people presented their analysis and David Spergel (of WMAP, previous head of the department at princeton) and others were able to walk them through how they thought they had kind of messed things up. This is what routinely happens, ESPECIALLY when something unexpected is observed. Every possible explanation is looked into, and ESPECIALLY in cosmology, you can do that incredibly well. Cosmology is one of the most beautiful sciences in my experience, precisely because we have such good ways to model the observations to probe various models, and you can treat the observations with Bayesian stats with virtually no risk of misspecifying your model, or, if you do find its misspecified, you have discovered something new about the universe. The process to go from raw observations to physics, correcting for all the crap in between early universe light and us (dust which also rotates light polarization -- this explained the BICEP issue, instrument systematics which are measured to incredible precision on the ground (e.g. point spread function -- what is the detector response to various intensities of light; e.g. you get electrons for bright sources that spill into neighboring pixels) Everyone everywhere is looking to make a name for themselves by discovering the discrepancy -- be it a screwup of some other team (astro community is generally very supportive and positive but also competitive) or a problem with simulation assumptions, a genuine discrepancy in our understanding of the universe (i.e. the tension in the hubble constant -- you infer rate of expansion from cosmic background radiation / early universe observations, and then try it using an alternative method -- using local variable stars, and you get a statistically significant difference). So I would say: if there's a screwup it will be found, and a genuine fuckup is possible and does happen, but when it does believe me we will know usually within a few months. You'll have a ton of people trying to reproduce the results, pouring over everything there is that could possibly explain these observations. The wheel of astrophysics grinds slowly but it grinds finely. Edit: also shoutout to Jenny Greene -- one of the world's foremost experts on galactic astronomy and also a genuinely great person. She rented me her house for a summer for dirt cheap when I was a poor grad student with nowhere to stay. Also hosted the best graduate student parties (our idea of a party is beer and board games and complaining about our advisers)

wanda 4mo ago

You won't make it to the next iteration without wrapping yourself in a black hole and appearing as an anomaly to future observers.

delichon 4mo ago
How do we know whether we're already in one?
- wanda 4mo ago
  A downside to the tech. You never really know if you made it because you enter another universe within. You make it to the next cycle, but within a new universe rather than the one you aimed for. Your black hole displaces spacetime within the universe whose cycle renewed, but you are no longer an active component of that universe. Of course, if you didn't deliberately do this, I guess you're a spectator to someone else in their black hole. So, congrats, I guess, but also you need to advance your science a bit faster if you don't want to count on luck next time.

api 4mo ago

The most exciting idea to me that JWST has bolstered is primordial black holes. Many models already predict them but JWST has provided the first good indirect evidence in the form of too-early galaxies. The models that predict PBHs predict that. If they exist, they would not be constrained to stellar mass and above. There could be a population of little black holes floating around. Anything under the mass of a decent size asteroid would have evaporated by now but anything that mass and above would still exist. They are a dark matter candidate, and one that doesn’t require new physics. But even if they don’t account for a significant amount of dark matter they still probably exist. The most exciting thing about PBHs is that one or more may exist in our solar system. They might have been captured over billions of years. Finding them would be incredibly challenging, especially if they are low mass, but if we did it means we could directly examine and experiment on a black hole. It could be something with the mass of a large asteroid but the size of a hydrogen atom. We could only find it by its gravitational effects. It would be utterly invisible otherwise unless it encountered matter and even then there might only be a tiny gamma ray flash, a nano accretion disc that lasts femtoseconds. We might also find smaller objects that appear to be orbiting nothing and find it that way. Directly accessing one could allow us to test theories of quantum gravity and things like string theory, and maybe more. A black hole could be like a Rosetta Stone of deep fundamental physics. The film Interstellar involved using plot magic to visit a black hole and solve physics, but this would allow it for real. It would just be an itty bitty one.

MichaelZuo 4mo ago
Does PBH theory also predict >1 billion solar mass black holes so early?
- api 4mo ago
  I believe it does, due to PBHs forming seeds for early accretion, but ask a non-armchair physicist (or a good LLM).
pmontra 4mo ago
Of course if we had a black hole in a lab (or one in a convenient orbit) we could run all sort of experiments, but which experiments exactly? We will start by throwing things at it and watch, obviously, but that's unimaginative. What are the smart experiments?

ck2 4mo ago

Nancy Grace Roman Telescope is also going to be amazing for raising new questions and I hope the attempt to lift the Swift telescope to a higher orbit is successful if you really want to stay on top of what is breaking astrophysics in realtime, I highly recommend following DrBecky on youtube or elsewhere, she is fantastic * https://www.youtube.com/@DrBecky/videos https://www.youtube.com/@DrBecky/videos

theodorejb 4mo ago

Instead of questioning whether the Big Bang assumption is true, astrophysicists prefer to perform endless "gymnastics" to try to make the mounting contrary data fit their theory about how the universe began.

cogman10 4mo ago
Are you kidding? An astrophysicist that could come up with a new model that explains the current data would win a Nobel prize and earth shattering levels of notoriety. The data found doesn't contradict the big bang in any shape or form. It does challenge beliefs around black hole formation. The reason for the big bang model is because based on all our measurements of all the visible universe, it appears that everything is spreading out. Any new model needs to explain why it is the universe appears to be spreading out. There's not a scientist alive that wouldn't like to discover that "actually a fundamental principle about my field of study is completely wrong". But that takes hard work, evidence, and models which better fit than the previous ones did. You need to find something that can't be explained with the old model and can only be explained with the new model.
- theodorejb 4mo ago
  The Big Bang is an almost infinitely malleable story, contorted to comport with almost anything we observe. But how is this useful? The predictions of this theory continually fail. The farther we look, the more we see stars, galaxies, black holes, and other structures that shouldn't exist according to this model. What if the universe doesn't have a naturalistic origin, but was created by God? How much greater would our understanding of the world be if more scientists focused on studying present phenomena rather than trying to fit stories about the past with observed data?
  - pndy 4mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculating_God?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculating_God?useskin=vector have fun
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swordlucky666 4mo ago

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hyperman1 4mo ago

There was a time where Hawking's A brief history of time gave a decent overview of the universe to beginners. Does anyone know how well it holds up today and if anything better exists?

ramraj07 4mo ago
There was never a time when a book gave the public an overview of the universe. ABHOT was so popular for being a book no one actually read, theres even an index named after Hawking due to it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_Index Did _you_ read that book? There however definitely was a piece of media that captured public minds and educated them about the cosmos. And that was the show Cosmos. The original of course. Not the NDT drivel.
- coliveira 4mo ago
  I did read it and I'm sure a whole generation of people also did, it is a very clear and readable book. Don't underestimate or minimize the impact of Hawking's book when it was released.
- hyperman1 4mo ago
  I did read the book, and know enough people who did. Now I may have weird interests, but that describes basically half the inhabitants of this site. BTW, as non-USAian, I never saw Cosmos and never heard of NDT.
- on_the_train 4mo ago
  Interesting. I've been gifted that book at just the right time in my life as a teenager. It captured me. I read it the to end many times. Not understanding everything or course. But it created a spark which laid the groundwork for my entire career. I've never seen cosmos.
- The_Blade 4mo ago
  i will never forget learning about Eratosthenes when i was very young and should have been playing Excitebike or something

myshapeprotocol 4mo ago

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analog31 4mo ago

So I wonder, where are these giant black holes now? There should be some closer to us than at the edge of the universe, unless something happens to them.

tgarrett 4mo ago
The supermassive black hole in the giant elliptical galaxy M87 is merely ~53 million light years away, close enough that we have now imaged it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_87#Supermassive_black_hole_M87* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_87#Supermassive_black_...
- blacksmith_tb 4mo ago
  Sagittarius A* is "merely" 26 thousand light years away (but we probably won't be imaging it, since there's a lot more in the way)
  - windsurfer 4mo ago
    The M87 supermassive blackhole is thousands of times as massive as Sagittarius A*, but since Sagittarius A* is a lot closer their emission rings appear roughly the same size in the sky (42 μas vs 51 μas). Both have already been imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_Telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_Telescope
  - erulastiel 4mo ago
    We’ve already imaged it with the event horizon telescope. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittarius_A*?wprov=sfti1# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittarius_A*?wprov=sfti1#

nzeid 4mo ago

> Recent ideas suggest that little red dots could be black holes cocooned in thick gas, possibly representing a completely new type of object called a black hole star, in which the tight shroud of gas emits light like a stellar atmosphere. Just be sure to name the members of Soundgarden on the paper.

baggachipz 4mo ago
Would you say this research is out of... Cornell?

xqcgrek2 4mo ago

Quanta magazine is a glorified university press release and marketing shop for Simons associated institutions. Take it with a grain of salt, and know for sure its leaving out a huge range of scientists views.

gjm11 4mo ago
The institutions, projects and individuals named in the article are, in order of appearance: --1-- Charlotte Mason (not, so far as I can tell, affiliated with or funded by the Simons Foundation) of the Cosmic Dawn Center (not, so far as I can tell, affiliated with or funded by the Simons Foundation) which is associated with the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen (not, so far as I can tell, affiliated with or funded by the Simons Foundation, except that the NBI hosts something called the "Niels Bohr International Academy" that has taken money from the Simons Foundation; it doesn't look to me as if Charlotte Mason has any connection with this) and also with the National Space Institute at the Technical University of Denmark (not, so far as I can tell, affiliated with or funded by the Simons Foundation) --2-- The James Webb Space Telescope (not, so far as I can tell, affiliated with or funded by the Simons Foundation) --3-- Jenny Greene (not, so far as I can tell, affiliated with or funded by the Simons Foundation, though she did once give a talk at the Center For Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute which is part of the Simons Foundation) of Princeton University (not, so far as I can tell, affiliated with the Simons Foundation though I expect it's taken some of their money, but in any case no one needs an excuse for reporting on work done at Princeton) --4-- Unnamed-in-the-article researchers who found that a "little red dot" is likely a supermassive black hole without stars around it; the Simons Foundation is not mentioned anywhere in the paper they published about this; neither the first-named author of that paper nor the one quoted in the linked article has obvious Simons connections, and both are at the University of Cambridge which, again, no one needs an excuse for reporting on the doings of. --5-- Rachel Sommerville of the Flatiron Institute. Here there really is a Simons connection; the Flatiron Institute is part of the Simons Foundation. It does computational research in scientific fields, astrophysics being one of them. --6-- "a meeting in April 2026 in Helsingør, Denmark" about the early universe; this was titled "Charting Cosmic Dawn in Copenhagen" and so far as I can tell has no Simons connection other than the fact that two of the 21 people listed as "invited speakers and tutorial leads" are from the Flatiron Institute, which seems innocuous since the F.I. does in fact do scientific research in this area. --7-- Hakim Atek (no Simons connection so far as I can see) of the Paris Institute of Astrophysics (no Simons connection so far as I can see, though I did find evidence that at least once the Simons Foundation has provided funding for a person working there) of the Sorbonne University (not affiliated with the Simons Foundation; I'm sure they sometimes take S.F. money but, yet again, this is not an institution that anyone needs excuses to report on the work of) So, I find one, count 'em, one, instance of a Simons-associated entity in the article. How very sinister of Quanta to mention them and hide their own affiliation. Oh, wait: "Editor’s note: The Flatiron Institute is funded by the Simons Foundation, which also funds this editorially independent magazine. Simons Foundation funding decisions have no influence on our coverage." You may, of course, choose not to believe that last claim. You might be right. But in this article I don't see any obvious sign of bias; they reported on a whole lot of things most of which have no particular connections with the Simons Foundation, and the one S.F.-affiliated thing they reported on does seem relevant. I can't rule out the possibility that Sommerville's work is actually bad and was reported on here only because of the Simons connection, but e.g. she is one of those invited contributors to that conference in Copenhagen which doesn't seem to have had a Simons connection and does seem to have been run by reputable astrophysicists.

hparadiz 4mo ago

Little red dots are my favorite new concept in astrophysics. This idea that there could be so much matter orbiting a black hole that the matter reaches sun levels of pressure which in turn starts steller fission without there being an star. Mind-blowing

stouset 4mo ago
Yep, it’s a super cool concept. A black hole of a given size has a finite amount of matter that it can ingest over a period of time. Trying to stuff more matter into it causes an outward pressure from essentially the friction of the swirling mass of material falling in. This radiation pressure could in theory be great enough to start fusion as would happen in a stellar core. Also fun is that this puts a limit on the largest possible black hole we should ever see in the universe. If you assume a black hole formed a moment after matter condensed and then ingested the maximum possible from then until now, you get an upper bound for the largest possible black hole according to our current understanding of the universe. This limit is somewhere around 36 billion solar masses.
- technotony 4mo ago
  Couldn't those large black holes merge though to get bigger ones?
  - muvlon 4mo ago
    Yes, exactly. Black hole mergers are the one thing exempt from the Eddington Limit, because there is no friction there.
- rolph 4mo ago
  a tokomok involving a scale appropriate blackhole is a super cool concept that just came to mind
- thecommakozzi 4mo ago
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sulam 4mo ago

I thought I read somewhere that many of these little red dots are turning out to be nothing more than bog-standard brown dwarfs in our own galaxy that are confusing the signal. These days we have some pretty powerful agents who can read these things faster than I can, so I went and found the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04004 https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04004 It turns out that brown dwarfs are actually corrected for, so my remembrance is correct but factored in. I’m posting anyway because 1) it’s interesting and mildly relevant and 2) others might have the same “vague but unclear” recollection I had and appreciate the elaboration.

JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
> many of these little red dots are turning out to be nothing more than bog-standard brown dwarfs Your own paper estimates 5 to 25% may be brown dwarfs, and says nothing about whether they might be in our galaxy or not.
- fractaled 4mo ago
  Pretty sure we can't resolve brown dwarfs farther than a few 10k ly (well inside the confines of our galaxy).
switchbak 4mo ago
That’s valuable: I thought the whole thing was dismissed based on the brown dwarf explanation, this is interesting that that’s not the case. It’s hard to keep up with all the news, particularly so given all the slop floating around. YouTube in particular seems to have a bunch of AI channels that just talk about this endlessly.

allcentury 4mo ago

Such a fun read, looking forward to more

HenryBemis 4mo ago

This comment will not contribute anything, and/but it is a thought that I had a few days ago, and I cannot 'shake' it. We keep 'discovering', recognising, mapping, etc. And I feel that every 'breakthrough' is "one step closer" (let's say 100 steps total), on a journey that is a thousand miles long. So, for the past 4000 years (or whichever century we can call the 'birth of astronomy'), we have accumulated 'this much' knowledge, and still we know a speck of sand in a vast desert, and perhaps now we have accelerated the rate of knowledge gathering, but still we are SO FAR.. ufff..

chickensong 4mo ago

This is almost the same article as https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-single-naked-black-hole-rewrites-the-history-of-the-universe-20250912/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-single-naked-black-hole-rew...