JWST discovers massive and compact quiescent galaxy
phys.org
phys.org
One could also say this new galaxy's mass is estimated to be 0.565 Milky Way masses, but for some reason that unit of mass seems not to have caught on...
Take the length and divide it by the length of a football field?
That would keep us entertained for many dog years.
It feels very fortunate to be around for all of these discoveries from JWST. It’s a joy to learn so much as a result of articles like these.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dgv2WWpm7_s
Just a warning though that each episode starts off gentle but by the end it's like "did I just take a 4th year astrophysics course?"
Why would they stop with the ads?
Wasn't talking about the general populous.
I'm not sure there's anything less "mystical" about Wolfram's postulations though. Is there a new scientific basis for these beliefs?
A. “Per our understanding of the universe, which is now finally provably correct and complete, no intelligent life whatsoever could have been causally involved in the emergence of various stellar objects or humanity itself.”
B. “Since our understanding of the universe is most likely incorrect and/or incomplete, some kind of intelligent life we are not yet aware of may or may not have been causally involved in the emergence of various stellar objects or even humanity itself.”
C. “We were made by fantasy abstract creature(s) not subject to any physical laws of this universe. We should probably worship them.”
Reality may be "boring" in that earth just may be super dooper lucky to have an accidental massive moon, a liquid iron core and a seasonal tilt to have made life. We also may be one of the first early conscious life in the universe (which would suck).
The really sad part is due to the laws of physics there is only a very limited bubble of time that we can ever see into the universe even if humans survive millions of years (unlikely).
If individuals had billion year long lifespans, sightings might just be staggeringly rare.
If someone comes up with a MOND simulation that is better than our current ones it may gain more traction.
So I stand behind “dark matter is obviously correct”. Although I’m pretty sure that WIMPs are BS.
Except none of these things are properly said to exist.
Dark matter is and always has been "fitting gaps in our current model to observed data". It's retroactive by construction and almost the definition of begging the question. Explanations for material origins as "dark matter" have nothing to do with reality and everything to do with a lack of imagination and humility.
I could explain fire by positing and observing phlogiston by fitting the residuals of incomplete models to data and I would have just as much "evidence" to stand on as dark matter zealots.
It is extremely anti-scientific, indeed an offense to the process of science itself, to 1) ignore the basic facts above to inform the assertion of such baseless claims and 2) to assert those claims so strongly.
As a bit of an aside, I've noticed a strong correlation with misuse of the singular and plural forms of the word "phenomenon" with non-physicists who want to sound like they know what they're talking about. By your standards, I have a pretty good theory that you're not a physicist. Are you comfortable applying your flavor of analysis and rigor to this observation, too...?
Screams of tortured tautology, sure there are some "residuals", but unless you are shooting down a particular incorrect assertion there's nothing wrong with lumping a set of observations under some banner. I'm sure we won't call it dark matter at some point, just as we no longer think of atoms as being atomic...nevertheless dark matter serves a purpose in our current state of ignorance, being mad or upset at that to me makes no sense.
We don't call "ether" a precursor to modern theories, we call it a wrong theory, because there is no substance "ether" which exists. We don't say try to justify their use of the word "ether" because of some tenuous you-know-what-they-meant wink-and-nod, it was just wrong. Newtonian mechanics was at least right in the limit.
At least with the atoms example it's a useful abstraction (see: atomic physics, chemistry) but there's no use to positing matter exists if the mechanism is really completely different from invisible matter. We could just as easily call it "the galactic explanatory gap" and maybe name it after someone who did a lot of work on it, maybe "the Zwicky tension" or something, without asserting the nature of the issue so strongly.
I'm not a physicist, but the explanation I'd heard was that something appears to have mass (due to patterns of gravitational objects seen through telescopes), but we can't see it.
So to be completely fair, we don't see any matter, we do see unexplained gravitational phenomena, which is optically invisible, but we do see something. Possibly, our model of gravitation is just completely wrong, and actually there are different forces which modulate the force of gravity.
Of the two, it seems dark matter is less controversial (matter that doesn't seem to reflect light) than positing new fundamental forces, as one involves a known set of theories (maybe its something like antimatter, or an alternative configuration of particles to the standard atomic ones at a quantum or particle physics level). I don't think ignoring it as a rounding error is a reasonable approach, unless you have some strong sources arguing that the physicists equipment is just bad (source, please), at least that's my impression.
Theories besides dark matter don't posit new fundamental forces, they posit that our understanding of gravity is incomplete and only applies in the limit of high-mass-density spacetime regions. This kind of elaboration of our physical theories has significant precedent: Newtonian mechanics is recovered when considering general relativity in the limit of distance scales much smaller than light-seconds and time scales much longer than infinitesimal time. It could be as well that our current models are only applicable in the limit of regions of dense mass. When things thin out (say, near the edges of galaxies) the transition to a modified dynamics appears to have significant explanatory power (since the limit no longer applies) with the added benefit that there's actually a model that can be validated or falsified.
Dark matter is the prevailing theory because it best explains our current observations. I'm aware that doesn't mean its right, and we don't have conclusive proof that it is.
There's definitely a problem with our current model looking at the Hubble tension, but the reason for that is still unknown.
So I love when armchair physicists come in and say dark matter is obviously wrong.
I could elaborate a complicated system of invisible mass to explain geocentrism if I wanted. Doesn't make it a good model.
You will note I didn't actually say "dark matter is wrong" but rather "there is nothing to the very foundations of the model itself". I'm not arguing against dark matter so much as for a theory of substance.
Not paid enough to afford an armchair, you mean? :)
> it best explains our current observations
I always figured dark matter to be nonsense because nobody ever listed any said observations, but only ever parroted that line. Even xkcd is guilty of it https://xkcd.com/1758
So better start giving out examples or you won't ever convince anyone. I'll start. The one that convinced me is the Bullet Cluster collision where it seems that regular matter collided and slowed down but something else which contributes most to the overall mass passed right through without interacting at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Cluster#Significance_to...