[HN Gopher] Oxygen discovered in most distant known galaxy
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Oxygen discovered in most distant known galaxy
Author : sohkamyung
Score : 150 points
Date : 2025-03-20 13:21 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eso.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eso.org)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It fits the theme that, according to Webb, the universe developed
| a lot more quickly in what we think were the first billion
| years... Most likely the "first billion years" were more like
| five billion years.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| There is growing evidence that doesn't fit the current model.
| It's funny how 'age is just a number' may be empirically true
| in a very existential sense.
| yoavm wrote:
| Sorry, but can you elaborate on that? In what sense are you
| thinking of?
| deadbabe wrote:
| In the sense that the point of "age" is supposed to
| indicate some kind of progress by which cohorts can be
| compared and classified into discrete groups.
|
| But increasingly, there is no correlation between age and
| specific developmental stages. It is merely a number that
| indicates how long something has been around but not what
| its current status may be.
| ttw44 wrote:
| This galaxy in particular must be one of the first galaxies
| ever formed. If galaxies are more mature than initially
| thought, what does this imply about our previous models and
| imply about what might actually be happening?
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| There seems to be a large region of the universe, beyond
| furthest edges of the observable, but "in front of" the CMB,
| that is already outside of our past light cone due to
| expansion of the universe.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| I don't know if there was just a crap ton of blue hypergiant
| stars in the early universe that crank through the fusion
| ladder in a couple million years, it wouldn't surprise me.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| 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 interesting if there _wasn 't_
| oxygen in distant galaxies.
| messe wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| moi2388 wrote:
| An order of magnitude is nothing if you know anything
| about how astronomers do their calculations xD
| fngjdflmdflg wrote:
| * element
| jmyeet wrote:
| 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
| pixl97 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Have you not seen the NJ UFO videos of late? Just like
| oxygen, they're here
| mh- wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Spooky.
| Isamu wrote:
| We can reframe the story as: oldest galaxy currently found is
| much more evolved than expected. We expected something more
| primitive.
| qoez wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Perhaps more interesting that we _haven 't_ found life!
| verisimi wrote:
| As one emergent phenomena of initial conditions to another,
| allow me to say 'hi'. Hi.
| mcculley wrote:
| Those of us who read the article think otherwise.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I'd say the same thing for biological life, but it'll still be
| newsworthy when we discover it the first time.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_population
| nimish wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The problem with building the factory for the Model T of
| galaxy scanners is the limited customer audience.
| nimish wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| Scientists have to publish a lot of papers (even useless
| ones) because that is how we have decided to rate them, for
| better or worse.
|
| And yes, they all mostly need to fish for funding to keep
| their not-so-well paid jobs going.
|
| They are hardly "ordained priests" though. I think you are
| trying to insult them, but not really sure what you even
| mean. They are pretty much by definition highly intelligent
| people who could earn a lot more by working for FAANG or
| hedge funds, but prefer to take lower paid work on the off
| chance they get to discover something interesting about the
| universe we live in. So not much like priests then.
| cozyman wrote:
| Average priest is smarter than most scientists because he
| knows God is real.
| moi2388 wrote:
| Claims to know..
| nimish wrote:
| > They are pretty much by definition highly intelligent
| people who could earn a lot more by working for FAANG or
| hedge funds
|
| Having interviewed many failed priests of higher education,
| this is not true. It might have been true 50 years ago, but
| if you are smart and intelligent you typically do not spend
| 5-7 of the most productive years of your life getting a
| PhD.
|
| >but prefer to take lower paid work on the off chance they
| get to discover something interesting about the universe we
| live in. So not much like priests then.
|
| This is exactly what priests do for religion right?
| Academics are ordained priests educated in the Seminary of
| Higher Education. You need to be granted a Doctor of
| Philosophy in order to join the Church of Higher Education,
| and then maybe a few decades of cloistered contemplation
| and publishing of prayers to the funding agencies will let
| you do something useful.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| Everyone I've met with a PhD was intelligent. Maybe not
| genius, but yeah, pretty damn intelligent.
|
| If you want to spend your life in the pursuit of
| knowledge rather than mere money or status, it's kind of
| a prerequisite to demonstrate you can perform original
| research.
|
| I honestly don't get the analogy with priests. They still
| seem utterly different to me.
| xandrius wrote:
| Everything is a non-story once it comes out.
|
| Even the obvious things have to be proven or we would never
| really know.
| metalman wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's not just about finding oxygen... it's about finding it
| this early in the universe's history
| vl wrote:
| 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.
| ck2 wrote:
| Note the theory in this release is the oxygen is from a mature
| star releasing heavier elements, not plant life.
|
| I thought oxygen detection was extremely difficult, they must
| have better methods now.
|
| adding:
|
| https://news.arizona.edu/news/how-next-gen-telescopes-could-...
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| Oxygen detection on specific exoplanets is very difficult,
| unless the planet happens to pass between its star and Earth so
| we can see light passing through its atmosphere. Oxygen
| detection across an entire galaxy, not as hard.
| fph wrote:
| Technically, all oxygen is from stars. Plants merely recombine
| chemically already-existing oxygen.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Oxygen detection in space isn't hard, the article in question
| seems to be an attempt at detecting oxygen on an exoplanet
| which is massively hard.
|
| Now, conversely, oxygen detection in galaxies/around stars is
| difficult for another reason. It doesn't want to remain free
| oxygen and will gladly bind with any other atoms/molecules it
| runs into.
|
| https://now.northropgrumman.com/what-happens-to-oxygen-in-sp...
| jasonlfunk wrote:
| I'm always a bit skeptical about these sorts of things. Perhaps
| I'm just ignorant about the methods used.. but the amount of data
| we can get from the most distant known galaxy can't be very much.
| How confident can we be that the shift in observed light or
| whatever is actually from the presence of Oxygen and not one of
| probably countless other causes, both known and unknown.
| floxy wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectroscopy#Atoms
| itishappy wrote:
| Pretty confident. Emission spectra are very specific. The
| _relationship_ between specific emission lines are invariant to
| changes in wavelength (redshift /blueshift), and they're
| complicated enough that it's not too big a deal to weed out
| false positives.
|
| Here's a textbook example:
|
| https://images.nagwa.com/figures/explainers/469167813067/17....
| interludead wrote:
| Skepticism is fair, but the confidence comes from how well we
| understand atomic spectra
| piker wrote:
| Is that about as well as we understand the formation of the
| universe? /s
| acdha wrote:
| There are a lot of very smart people working in astronomy, they
| review each other's work, and they compete for jobs and
| funding. Does it really seem likely that none of them have
| thought to validate basic assumptions?
|
| Having family members who do that for a living, I can tell you
| that's a huge chunk of the job. Astronomers all know that they
| have significant limitations in the data that they can collect
| and spend a lot of time thinking about ways they can test
| different theories. It would be a career-making move if some
| grad student could come up with a new explanation which changes
| the previous understanding and given the ratio of degrees
| granted to jobs the incentives really wouldn't favor covering
| anything up.
| fasteo wrote:
| Off topic:
|
| - Is the big bang theory _the_ scientific consensus on the origin
| and evolution of the universe ?
|
| - What are the alternatives ?
| okayishdefaults wrote:
| Consider the bbt as a collection of observations and models
| that are independently validated. As each of those components
| reach increasingly accurate representations of what we observe,
| the bbt improves.
|
| In this way, there can be no alternative as there is no
| alternative to music theory. Some people may have a very narrow
| view of music theory, but it truly encompasses every model we
| accept about aspects of music.
|
| Tldr- the questions can't be answered because the bbt is a not
| a theory like "THE theory of relativity". The "theory" is at
| the end of the term which denotes a collection and not a
| specific model.
| elashri wrote:
| Big bang theory really a term describing the moment the
| universe started and not the evolution and how things evolved
| with time which have more questions than answer. The standard
| model of cosmology is the most accepted theory about universe.
| But you can't have knowledge about anything before the
| singularity. Actually we don't even know for sure what happens
| in the seconds after that because we need a much more powerful
| colliders than what we have now to produce the same conditions.
| But there are many theories about what could have happened.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Add to it we need much more reliable ways to detect super
| weak neutrinos. If we had that ability we could see into the
| first seconds of the universe whereas the universe was dark
| to light for hundreds of thousands of years.
| moomin wrote:
| I mean, there is at the very least a theory that at very
| small levels, the quantum effects take over and we're
| actually looking at a cyclic bang/crunch model. It's
| literally discussed in A Brief History of Time. But this is
| more of a refinement.
| thesz wrote:
| Big Flash.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSSDi22NVFo
|
| As if matter existed and then there was a creation of light at
| some moment. Red shift is explained by interaction of light
| with gravitational field - the more distant source of light,
| the longer it travels under the influence of gravity and the
| more red it becomes.
| thangalin wrote:
| The first four explanations of illustrations in my book delve
| into your off-topic point and bring it back on-topic:
|
| https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf
| shemtay wrote:
| @dang the article does not seem to imply that molecular oxygen
| was found. maybe retitle to "Oxygen element" or "Atomic oxygen"?
| elashri wrote:
| Oxygen is the name of the element. The usage of oxygen to
| describe the molecule that does have bonding of two oxygen
| atoms is the source of confusion not the reverse.
| shemtay wrote:
| If you peruse the comments here, quite a few people seem to
| have been confused on this point
| magicmicah85 wrote:
| A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away...
|
| This is interesting but at same time oxygen is the third most
| abundant element so it's not surprising to find it, I suppose.
| Neat anyway.
| interludead wrote:
| Finding oxygen in a galaxy this young is pretty wild
| lab14 wrote:
| Why?
| Keyframe wrote:
| probably because it depends on the star types that produce
| oxygen; it takes awhile until these stars form from previous
| in sequence.
| https://science.nasa.gov/universe/stars/types/#neutron-stars
| EGreg wrote:
| How can they possibly be sure that it is oxygen doing that?
| vpribish wrote:
| they are witches and read it in the tea leaves, i guess. i
| didn't read the article
| gentle wrote:
| I'm always fascinated by the posters here who insist on second-
| guessing the writers and the scientists who spend their whole
| lives studying a topic like this.
|
| No one needs to read your post fessing up to your profound
| ignorance and the fact that you didn't really read the link.
| dvt wrote:
| I second this, and it tends to be a sitewide issue. HN has
| really changed over the past 5+ years: went from healthy or
| interesting skepticism to reddit-style snarkiness and
| shitposting.
| acdha wrote:
| There's always been some of that but it does feel like it's
| getting worse. I think there's a general shift in how people
| approach Skinner-ized apps and social media, where a couple
| of generations have been trained to prioritize a number going
| up, but also something about how politics became both post-
| factual and unavoidable even in communities which used to
| avoid it, all of which has driven a lot of former
| contributors away.
|
| I'm not sure how to rebalance things - and certainly won't
| claim to be perfect about not taking the bait myself - but it
| seems to be slowly starving a lot of communities which don't
| have some in-person anchoring.
| mmooss wrote:
| You might read the guidelines, much older than five years,
| about saying HN has changed, and also saying it's more like
| reddit.
| lordnacho wrote:
| I don't think I've ever been on a forum that doesn't have
| comments to that effect regularly.
|
| "It was better a few years ago, it's all going to hell now,
| we're becoming Reddit/4Chan/Slashdot"
|
| It's the internet forum version of "the youth has gotten
| lazy, it weren't like this when I were a lad"
| borgdefenser wrote:
| I was on usenet in 1995 but I have heard that was too
| late and usenet already sucked then.
|
| In all fairness too, my 17 year old self who knew
| basically nothing about the world ,really did add
| absolutely nothing of value to the usenet discussions I
| participated in besides noise. Of course, at the time I
| thought the complete opposite.
|
| The thing that amuses me most is at the time there would
| have been a lot of "pro communism" in my responses on
| anything society related even though I knew absolutely
| nothing about communism and even less about economics as
| a whole.
|
| I think this is just the way semi-anon discussions with
| big age and generation gaps go.
| gosub100 wrote:
| Science cannot be trusted anymore. Journals don't validate
| anything they submit. Departments are rewarded by how much
| money they wring out of the government, not by whether what
| they say is true. Next week they'll publish another paper about
| how they were wrong.
|
| Also you don't sound "fascinated", so if you're complaining at
| least be honest about it. There are many more descriptive words
| than "fascinated".
| mmooss wrote:
| > Science cannot be trusted anymore. Journals don't validate
| anything they submit. Departments are rewarded by how much
| money they wring out of the government, not by whether what
| they say is true. Next week they'll publish another paper
| about how they were wrong.
|
| What do you feel when you post that?
| ranger207 wrote:
| > Next week they'll publish another paper about how they were
| wrong.
|
| Isn't that what's they're supposed to do? "Hey we found this
| thing, here's how we did it." Next week: "Yeah I checked your
| data and got different results, let's figure out what's
| different." A few months/years later: "We've figured out
| where the problems were and now have a better understanding
| of this."
| jcims wrote:
| I'm probably guilty of making comments that read this way at
| times, but it's almost always out of curiosity and a dash of
| invoking Cunningham's law.
|
| Lately I've started feeding my questions into LLMs to explore
| these ideas. Given that I will almost certainly never make a
| decision where an improper understanding of astrophysics is at
| fault, I'm willing to run the risk of hallucinations leading me
| to improper conclusions. :)
|
| For the morbidly curious:
| https://chatgpt.com/share/67dc94a3-07c8-800c-bdbf-039dd2ce50...
|
| (It's funny, I've seen people say that they generally don't
| even bother with spell checking questions to LLMs because it
| doesn't seem to make any difference. I was tempted to rerun
| this before posting to fix the disorganized thoughts in my
| questions, but I ain't got time for that.)
| atonse wrote:
| I love this chat. This is exactly the kind of chat I've had
| with ChatGPT about things like Native American reservations,
| their history, etc.
|
| Stuff like this is what I love most about these LLMs.
|
| As someone who minored in astronomy and especially loved
| stuff about stellar life cycles, I didn't see any red flags
| in what you were told.
| jcims wrote:
| Nice! It's like having a patient neighbor that knows a lot
| about some topic but, you know, don't bet your life on it
| being accurate haha.
|
| Thanks!!!
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Gotta add the time factor. "Billions of years ago"
| setopt wrote:
| Isn't that even more interesting?
| joquarky wrote:
| Oxygen is everywhere.
|
| Hydrogen is everywhere.
|
| The possibilities are interesting.
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