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Comment by sesm | Hacker News Reader

Can those be just globular clusters in their 'bright' phase? Globular clusters are not even mentioned in that article, which is weird.

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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.

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 :-(

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

Why? How do the astronomers know that its many stars, how did they rule out its the normal amount but brighter?

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.

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.

There is no solid/proven explanation right now. Only hypotheses to be tested. It’s a new phenomenon they’re working to understand.

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.

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.

Such a mass-to-light ratio is accounted for when computing a stellar mass.

I've read the paper, those objects have all properties of AGNs, but since having AGNs so early doesn't fit current mainstream, authors try very hard to come up with a different explanation.

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