[HN Gopher] Tiny bright objects discovered at dawn of universe b...
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       Tiny bright objects discovered at dawn of universe baffle
       scientists
        
       Author : Brajeshwar
       Score  : 84 points
       Date   : 2024-06-29 15:54 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (phys.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
        
       | davedx wrote:
       | > Leja explained that if you took the Milky Way and compressed it
       | to the size of the galaxies they found, the nearest star would
       | almost be in our solar system. The supermassive black hole in the
       | center of the Milky Way, about 26,000 light years away, would
       | only be about 26 light years away from Earth and visible in the
       | sky as a giant pillar of light.
       | 
       | Pretty crazy galaxies.
        
         | amelius wrote:
         | Things would be more crazy if it was different.
        
       | bsenftner wrote:
       | How's about super massive black holes are massive enough their
       | gravity well accelerates the mass being captured faster than the
       | speed of light, and they plunge back in time. The Universe is
       | self regenerating, by sending super massive black holes back to
       | the beginning of time, where they explode into our universe. Or
       | something like that. Maybe, maybe not.
        
         | exe34 wrote:
         | this would make really good sci-fi, you should write it up!
        
           | robxorb wrote:
           | [GPT has entered the chat.]
        
         | VagabundoP wrote:
         | Not only is space time probably curved back on its self but the
         | arrow of time as well. Time is a flat circle!
        
           | ramon156 wrote:
           | Maybe flat earther are yet to discover an even bigger truth,
           | flat time
        
           | EdwardDiego wrote:
           | Pfft everyone knows it's a cube.
        
       | oldmariner wrote:
       | Leftovers from an old Big Crunch?
        
         | exe34 wrote:
         | it'd be tricky to get them from one side to the other. you'd
         | think the quark soup would vaporise them.
        
           | oldmariner wrote:
           | Perhaps it didn't compress evenly?
           | 
           | There's no reason a previous universe had to form, expand, or
           | stay distributed evenly.
        
             | frutiger wrote:
             | Unfortunately we have not observed any anisotropy so it
             | seems implausible.
        
               | downvotetruth wrote:
               | https://arxiv.org/abs/0811.2732
               | 
               | 1. Introduction
               | 
               | Since the discovery of the _anisotropy_ of the cosmic
               | microwave background (CMB) radiation by COBE...
        
               | exe34 wrote:
               | is this the same one that penrose saw the ghost of
               | universes past in?
        
               | downvotetruth wrote:
               | Penrose has published many papers on ghosts of black
               | holes from another universe (see
               | https://www.livescience.com/63392-black-holes-from-past-
               | univ... for commentary), but 0811.2723 does not have
               | Penrose as an author or state a reference to him by name.
        
               | dagss wrote:
               | When CMB anisotropies are studied, one question is to see
               | the the universe is isotropic or anisotropic -- these are
               | two different uses of the word isotropic, on completely
               | different scales.
               | 
               | The current prevailing science is saying that the CMB
               | anisotropies are telling us the universe is isotropic...
               | 
               | The linked paper does however talk about an apparent
               | deviation from this standard picture...but that is not
               | what the word "anisotropy" is about in that quote.
               | 
               | Gurzadyan is not the most representative researcher to
               | cite. While doing a PhD in astrophysics I remember a
               | paper coming out where Gurzadyan co-published with
               | Penrose but the paper had obvious flaws due to basic lack
               | of understanding of statistical simulation, and there
               | were many other groups jumping on showing it wrong within
               | a few days..
               | 
               | IIRC the problem was that it was assumed that independent
               | random variables in one space would still be independent
               | after a linear transform (Fourier transform/spherical
               | harmonic transform). I.e. failure in basic statistical
               | algebra stuff underpinning the statistical simulations.
               | This was not nitpicking, the whole result vanished once
               | other groups redid the experiment with corrected algebra.
               | 
               | The talk was all about how Penrose could possibly have
               | been fooled into putting his name on the paper -- and why
               | he would not retract it even after many pointed out the
               | blatant entry level mistakes.
        
               | mr_mitm wrote:
               | The anisotropies in the CMB are ridiculously tiny.
               | Microscopic. And they're extremely evenly spread.
               | 
               | On large scales, the universe is incredibly isotropic.
        
             | munchler wrote:
             | Everything in the observable universe compressed to an
             | extremely uniform degree, as reflected in the cosmic
             | microwave background radiation (CMBR), our earliest "image"
             | of the universe. Variations in the CMBR are on the order of
             | one part per million.
        
         | theptip wrote:
         | No, we know (because of the CMB) that everything was compressed
         | into a dense plasma until ~300kyr (rough estimate from memory)
         | so there was no way for these structures to survive a previous
         | crunch.
        
       | Zigurd wrote:
       | It was just 101 years ago that galaxies outside the Milky Way
       | were discovered and that the universe we can observe grew from
       | being 100k light years to 93 billion light years in diameter. The
       | existence of black holes was first observed in the 1970s. It is a
       | good bet other astonishing objects are yet to be discovered.
        
         | DexesTTP wrote:
         | Not quite that, we've known about galaxies outside our own
         | (like the Magellanic clouds or the Andromeda galaxy) for a few
         | millenia, and the main reason black holes haven't been
         | discovered for a while because they're black and we needed a
         | theory to know where to look. The current theory of cosmology
         | has overall been pretty stable for a while.
         | 
         | What's interesting there isn't that much the object themselves
         | which are bog-standard as far as celestial objects go, but how
         | red-shifted (and therefore how far away/long ago) they are,
         | which is something the model doesn't quite exclude but does
         | warrant some tweakings of the "initial parameters" of the
         | universe to make it work this way compared to what we expect.
        
           | actionfromafar wrote:
           | But did we know they were _galaxies_ and not just some
           | shining object?
        
             | macintux wrote:
             | Their nature wasn't confirmed until the 20th century.
             | Wikipedia tackles the history:
             | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda_Galaxy
        
           | Hemospectrum wrote:
           | > we've known about galaxies outside our own (like the
           | Magellanic clouds or the Andromeda galaxy) for a few millenia
           | 
           | Well, we could _see_ them, but we weren 't able to
           | distinguish a galaxy from a nebula until after investing
           | multiple centuries into the development of powerful
           | telescopes.
        
       | someplaceguy wrote:
       | Maybe this is what a white hole looks like...
        
         | prettyStandard wrote:
         | Galaxy Brain thought:
         | 
         | I feel like the big bang is a white hole.
         | 
         | Come back I have more!
         | 
         | All world lines end in black holes. All world lines start at
         | white holes.
         | 
         | Many Worlds theory is pretty popular. I buy into it. Every
         | thing that can happen does happen, but also... There's this one
         | that goes every black hole spawns a new universe, with slightly
         | different laws of physics, based on the parent universe. So the
         | multiverse starts favouring universes that can make new ones.
         | 
         | Does this mean the Spiderman universe is out there somewhere?
         | Even hypothetically IDK. There's probably some constraint on
         | consistent laws of physics.
        
           | DEADMINCE wrote:
           | That's some great sci-fi.
        
       | seo-speedwagon wrote:
       | Naive thought incoming:
       | 
       | If these old galaxies are so dense, could that help explain why
       | their black hole is disproportionately large? With so many stars
       | so close together, maybe they're gravitationally interacting with
       | each other far more, causing a lot more instability. So you have
       | a bunch of stars knocking each other around and as a byproduct
       | more of them get flung close enough to the center to get captured
       | by the black hole?
        
       | MattPalmer1086 wrote:
       | Loving how we are finding mysteries the further back we look.
       | Super massive black holes far larger than our models can account
       | for. Galaxies with more structure and more older population
       | stars.
       | 
       | What is it telling us? Our current ideas are certainly wrong.
       | Looking forward to what it leads us to.
        
       | awinter-py wrote:
       | so quick bright things come to confusion
        
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