James Webb Telescope discovers some quasars that seem to exist in isolation
scitechdaily.com
scitechdaily.com
first brown dwarfs seen in other galaxies too
https://bsky.app/profile/philplait.bsky.social/post/3l7bssmh...
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/249679/gravother... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryon_acoustic_oscillations
So you end up with this paradoxical situation where a "hot" mass starts to interact with a "cold" one and ends up making it even colder, so it collapses.
Of course then you get rocks sitting at a different internal temperature than the temperature of the overall cloud of rocks, and yes, over time that would reach an equilibrium. However, heat transfer in space, for large objects, is slow enough that this can be a very long time indeed.
Thinking some more about it, there are probably some ways to constrain the amount of time it takes for a past runaway to have occurred that rules this explanation out.
Using the official age of the universe we need to then form the quasar in a dense matter region and then speedrun a galaxy merger that ejects the relevant quasar out into sparse space, all of that in a few hundred million years only.
Using contemporary cosmology practices I suggest we add a Dark Age to everything observed. Yes the age of the quasar is 13 billion something years in the axis of regular time, but due to observations disagreeing with this timeline we can just keep adding years to any given observation in the Dark Age, complex time axis, until the problem is solved
AFAIK we have seen indirect evidence of their existence with Webb. They could explain some of this early structure.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Inflation has no influence on galaxy formation. Its duration was also a tiny fraction of a second, not years. It's also the first time I have heard it being associated with the term "dark age". The only actual "dark age" in cosmology in the common sense of the term is the period between reionization and first light by stars. Nothing to do with the quasars we are discussing here. It's really hard for me to read the comment in the way you suggest.
You can learn more about the problem from this physicist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qS34oV-jv_A
> Inflation has no influence on galaxy formation.
That's completely not what I was talking about. I was saying that the era of rapid inflation that despite being postulated to be just a fraction of a second had immense impact on the shape of the universe can't be swept under the rug just because it's short and is already a kind of "Dark Time" when huge things were happening despite time barely passing.
You could equally sensibly postulate that 500 million years since the Big Bang there was a fraction of a second when galaxy formation underwent accelerated progress that aged them few billion years and that explains early black holes and such. Hopefully it won't come to that and more sensible explanation of what JWST sees will prevail.
It's true that "dark age" is not talked about in cosmology and is and invetion of the downvoted user. However when you think about it this naming analogy makes perfect sense when there seems to be missing mass it's called dark matter (which makes sense since it looks like the mass is there but it isn't shining), if there's missing energy it's called dark energy (despite the fact that we don't expect it to be shining in any way)... by extension when there's time missing we could call this problem dark time (witch is about as sensible name as dark energy) ... It's a case like scandal in Watergate hotel and then naming all scandals something-gate.
Angela collier's video is philosophically disingenuous (I do believe she believes what she says). You can't just lump a set of observations together and say it's not a hypothesis. The act of lumping those observations together implies the hypothesis that they share a casual unification.
"Observation" in the scientific vernacular carries added cachet because (barring fraud or miscalculation) it's irrefutable and more value neutral, versus a "hypothesis" which is designed to be refuted.
Calling the Dark Matter hypothesis an observation is a blatant attempt to inappropriately steal a sense of irrefutability. It's kind of terrifying that smart people are repeatedly using her video as a dunk
Irrefutability?
That doesn't sound scientific at all. Especially in the context of hypothesis that supposedly accounts for a set of observations unexplainable by status quo, while having zero predictive power so far.
The only irrefutable thing is that we observe something that behaves like gravitational attraction from the spots in space that don't seem to emit electromagnetic radiation. "Why is that?" is the Dark Matter problem or question. Anything said beyond that question on this subject is a hypothesis of some form of solution to that question. All of them equally useless so far.
> Irrefutability?
> That doesn't sound scientific at all
We're not talking about science here, we are talking about the philosophy of science.
At a trivial level it is still a hypothesis that each deviation from newtons laws (as in on a per galaxy basis) we observe has a common cause. But let's say that's quite trivial and it's an extremely easy hypothesis to accept.
There are levels to this. Are the deviations at the galaxy level caused by the same phenomenon as the deviations at the cluster level? Easy to believe, but still needs to be poked at. Slightly harder to believe out of hand than the previous
Is the ringing in the CMB caused by the same thing? If you don't admit that that is a harder sell (if even slightly) then that's dishonest.
By having grouped all of these distinct observations into one group of observations Angela has slyly implied they are all caused by the same thing, and introduced friction to exploring the possibility that they are not. That is scientifically irresponsible. Especially given, as you say, all the models suck.
Even this isn't commonly accepted hypothesis that explains the problem named Dark Matter. MOND postulates that while most of the observed effects have the same cause, that gravity works differently, it also states that smaller effects observed might have another source.
She's lumping all those observations because they are lumped by most physicists because they might potentially have a single cause and thus might be parts of singular problem. Maybe at some point Dark Matter problem will have to be split into several but we are not at that point of knowledge yet.
Physicists have always searched for theories of everything and I haven't seen where the friction introduced by that search prevented them from finding out how parts like quantum mechanics or gravity work even if they don't have any underlying common mechanism. On the contrary, idea that vastly different phenonmenons might have a single cause led to deep advancements and insights like in the case of Newtonian gravity.
Philosophy is BS. It doesn't matter. What matters if there's data available. Until there is, everything is open to ridicule because all ideas are ridiculous until some of them are shown to be true. Then the next generation learns about them at schools, integrates them into their intuition and they no longer see how ridiculous they are.
And there are many cases where you absolutely can't do that. For example, to fully explain how nuclei work, you must have both a strong AND weak nuclear force.
> Physicists have always searched for theories of everything
searching for theories of everything is arguably a big part of why physics is broken right now and hasn't made major progress outside of a few big experiments in decades
> Philosophy is BS. It doesn't matter. What matters if there's data available.
"What matters is if there's data available" is a philosophy of science. Look a lot of philosophy is BS, but you're peddling in the noncentral fallacy here. The philosophy of science is extremely important, and as a former working scientist I've seen so many scientists get caught up in their own fraud/self-delusion because they don't have a central philosophy of science to guide their efforts.
And, apparently, poor lonely black holes can evaporate over time?
Hawking temperature is inversely proportional to black hole size, so the bigger the hole the "colder" it is. The largest black holes will start evaporating very slowly once the CMB drops below their temperature.
A tiny micro black hole, if one were created, would evaporate almost instantly converting 100% of its mass into energy, basically a bomb. E.g. a 1kg micro black hole smaller than an electron would have a yield similar to a small hydrogen bomb, most of which would be released as ultra high energy gamma rays.
Black holes are awesome. In some ways they are the most extreme things in the universe, the extreme-est of extreme physics.
The mass-energy density required to create them is so far beyond anything humanly possible that trying to do so with, for example, hydrogen bombs would be not much better than trying to do it by squeezing really hard with your hand. It requires things like the first few milliseconds after the Big Bang (if primordial black holes exist) or collapsing massive stars. To give a sense of this density: a black hole with the mass of the Earth would be about the size of a marble (Schwartzchild radius). Inside of course there's either a true singularity or -- if certain theories of quantum gravity are correct -- a region of some kind of maximum-theoretical-density matter. (Some theories predict that true singularities don't exist.)
If somehow someday it were possible to create or control them, it would be possible to access energies far beyond fusion or even antimatter-driven reactions... think perfect direct mass-energy conversion with near 100% efficiency.
tl;dr there's a lot of dust around the quasar
Astronomy has a big problem with people overhyping their results