[HN Gopher] Astronomers puzzled by little red galaxies that seem...
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Astronomers puzzled by little red galaxies that seem impossibly
dense
Author : jandrewrogers
Score : 84 points
Date : 2024-08-31 20:25 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newscientist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newscientist.com)
| riidom wrote:
| https://archive.is/NhWAs
| sesm wrote:
| Can those be just globular clusters in their 'bright' phase?
| Globular clusters are not even mentioned in that article, which
| is weird.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I'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.
| fch42 wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| I 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
| blueflow wrote:
| Why? How do the astronomers know that its many stars, how did
| they rule out its the normal amount but brighter?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Which 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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| There is no solid/proven explanation right now. Only
| hypotheses to be tested. It's a new phenomenon they're
| working to understand.
| stevenrj wrote:
| Assuming 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 wrote:
| In 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 wrote:
| Must be heck of a night sky on one of those planets
| andrewflnr wrote:
| They 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 wrote:
| Man 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?
| saddat wrote:
| https://astrobites.org/
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Most likely the same principle that formed earth and life
| will form else where even if slightly different
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I wonder how close we are talking.
|
| "close" in astronomical terms tends to be rather a long way
| away,
| nacho-daddy wrote:
| Is 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 wrote:
| Well, 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 wrote:
| "Red galaxies? On a Friday night? They're so hot and dense
| and full of obnoxious Level III civilizations, nobody goes
| there anymore."
| eru wrote:
| Colder 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
| uoaei wrote:
| occam's razor says probably not
| postalrat wrote:
| Says who? Have you considered the alternatives?
| jajko wrote:
| Maybe 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.
| gehsty wrote:
| This is what happens once you start down the road of making
| Paperclips...
| naikrovek wrote:
| Too soon.
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| "It looks like you're telling a transhumanist parable. Would
| you like help?"
|
| https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html#-game
| montjoy wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Space 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 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| I hope this quote has made its way into the academic
| literature in some way.
| moi2388 wrote:
| "Unlock this article"
|
| Please stop linking to paywalls ffs.
| original_idea wrote:
| archive.ps or whatever the domain is now.
| r721 wrote:
| Archive.today is the master domain which should redirect to
| the best one for one's location:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today
| jamiek88 wrote:
| How does that work?
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| Plug: I made <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-
| puz...
|
| 2. https://waybackinator.com/https://www.newscientist.com/art
| ic...
|
| 3. "That URL is not available via the internet archive API."
|
| Oh well.
| jwilk wrote:
| If it's just for The Wayback Machine, you can prepend
| https://web.archive.org/web/ to the URL; no need for the
| waybackinator indirection.
| anon56237526 wrote:
| I've made a bookmark of the URL
| https://web.archive.org/web/%s in Firefox, and assigned
| the "wm" keyword to it, so I only have to prepend _that_.
|
| LPT: you can right click on any search box and select
| "Set a keyword to this search" (or whatever it is exactly
| in English).
| fsflover wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989
| moi2388 wrote:
| Waybackinator and web.archive.org don't work, the latter also
| shows the paywall.
|
| You can only post it with workarounds.
|
| Furthermore it might also be legal to shit in your living
| room; I would however still consider it bad form.
| wizardforhire wrote:
| My 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 wrote:
| The preprint version of the main paper being discussed:
| https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2408.07745
| pfdietz wrote:
| "We stress, however, that the canonical interpretation of AGNs
| causing the broad Hb lines also remains viable."
| le-mark wrote:
| What's the layperson's interpretation of this?
| pfdietz wrote:
| They 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 wrote:
| They'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.
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