It _is_ possible to explain difficult science in a correct, non-spectacular, non-oversimplified, not-pr-like yet interesting way to everyone interested in the subject. My compliments for every video so far.
2:53 - Whoever does those animations really needs to be told that *redshift (of something that starts out blue) doesn't go **_through_** purple.* It's (at least) the second time they make something go blue -> magenta-> red, which is the _opposite_ of the way redshift works. It would go blue -> green -> yellow -> red (progressively *increasing* wavelengths / decreasing frequencies). In fact, magenta isn't a wavelength at all, it's just the way our brain interprets a mix of frequencies at the low and high end of our visible visible spectrum (i.e., red and blue/violet), in the absence of mid-range frequencies (i.e., yellow / green). If you're doing a colour shift to illustrate some physical property and going _through_ magenta, you're doing something wrong.
Wow, this video is an amazing explanation. I saw another video about lyman-alpha breaks (going over similar observations from JWST) and I sort of got it, but this gives a really great explanation of how it occurs and what the double break means. Thanks!
Agreed! This is by far the best explanation I've ever seen. He explained the lyman-alpha break in a great set of steps. 1. all energies above a certain level will ionize the atom, absorbing all of the radiation. 2. the spectrum will have a drop, a cliff, as you move to the left, at the point where all of the radiation starts being absorbed. 3. because the spectrum's y-axis is the intensity of the radiation. 4. (exercise for the viewer) and because the spectrum's x-axis is wavelength, which is inversely proportional to energy. The shorter wavelengths as you go left are higher energies. I could do that step 4 on my own because I finally understood 1, 2, and 3. Awesome!
What I like most is how Prof. Merrifield gets *most* excited when Brady asks him what could potentially be *wrong* with his own work at about 11:03. That is a sort of concentrated form of the spirit of inquiry as seen through facial expression and gesture.
It's incredible how much can be resolved from so little signal - a few pictures in different wavelengths and a few very clever people with the right tools can break the current understanding of galaxy formation. Remarkable.
The JWST finding galaxies so close to when the Big Bang is supposed to have occurred is like taking someone to an island that is supposed to of never had human habitation and when you get there you find a shopping mall.
I always wondered how you attribute a red shifted transmission line to a specific element. But I guess sufficient resolution as well as multiple peaks is the way to go.
Of course the observation is not wrong, the problem lies in the theories. But the explanations are beaten into the astronomers probably since childhood. So its difficult for them to go outside, and seek a new fundamental explanation. This is good that it shakes out the flaws.
My intuition is that early galaxies would coalesce and grow in the early universe significantly faster than they could later. The density of mass to accrete was much higher and had much shorter distance to travel to clump up. It could have been quite reasonable for some to form within the first couple hundred million years. Was this not actually the case? Has it been shown that the galaxies didn't form much faster?
From what i understand, the longer the wavelength the harder it is to resolve fine details. Does it mean we get less "features"/information when looking at extremely far objects?
Yes, galaxies are formed by stars. But it isn't stars we're looking at in these plots and images - it's the galaxies. We really can't see single stars that far away.
@@d5uncr agreed and if they were simply random early stars, they would be evenly distributed everywhere you pointed the JWST as opposed to clumped together as you see in the photos of the galaxies in the video.
Is it possible that early galaxies had a higher proportion of red dwarf stars than modern galaxies? If they did, would the light from those stars be so red shifted that we have no instruments capable of seeing them at all? How would that affect the mass calculations of early galaxies?
If the electron is ionized and has been torn away from the atom, what is then absorbing the energy? As I understand it, the protons can't do that, only the electrons. But, do they still have higher energy states if they are no longer a part of an atom?
I do not understand. If the edge of the visible universe is the beginning of time, how can that increasingly large sphere of galaxies all fit back into the tinier sphere 1,100³ times smaller ?
The observations are not wrong. But our interpretation of the redshift is. We took for granted that the fabric of our own galactic plane, doesnt distort the photon image. But it does! The recent EHT image of sag a* clearly proves a quantum effect is taken place turning the image of the centre of our galaxy 90 degrees rotated. Likewise we will have a distorted image of our outward view of the cosmos, as a QP effect would also entail the inverse arrow of time when looking out. Meaning a cosmoc redshift os actually a blue shift. Which means galaxies are heading towards us, not away. Likewise they are NOT related to a big bang event so they could be much older than we think. Problem solved. Next please.
If they build a Space Telescope for the microwave\mm bands the same effect will appear. There was no big bang. CMBR also disproves BBT because CMBR maps change every year which is not possible. Most of the CMBR comes from inside the milky way. The better the instruments get, the older the universe gets.
No. It's saying that galaxies several hundred million years after the CMB are surprisingly bright and large for what we expect from current models. No visible light signal 'behind' the CMB should exist, since that involved a universe-wide 'fog' that scattered all light.
The early universe was just more dense than mainstream theory suggests. Not just large galaxies existed (data) but surely lots of primeval black holes (which, if Hawking radiation is wrong, could account for Dark Matter today).
Also the population surveys that discredit black holes as dark matter require their mass range be the same size as the collisions we observe in LIGO, which suggests there is a non-trivial population of this mass range of black holes. But no... it is WIMPs just build a bigger collider we'll see them this time I swear 😂
@@hugmynutus - The Emperor's WIMPs, soon to be found after budget is exhausted into yet another larger collider, famous European tale... 😂 Anyway, I'm not sure I understand the issue of LIGO ranges you mention. I know that LIGO/Libra can only detect certain ranges of mergers (always mergers and never single BHs or neutron stars) but those are anyhow quite large in scope, right? I say judging on the results, which include a vast array of sizes for the merging BHs including some that are hyperbolically deemed "impossible". So are you talking of too small BHs to be detected by LIGO? and, in that case, what about microlensing surveys, which reportedly seem to discard the existance of many primeval BHs, at least in our vicinity? In any case, glad to find another mind who is able to question the "quantum hack" of Hawking Radiation being real (without any clear evidence even prospective one). Ironically Hawking himself (who deserves all respect even if possibly wrong on this issue) actually defended BHs as DM candidates in 2014.
@@drsatan9617 - Should be lower: entropy increases with time. Also, why galaxy formation benefit from high entropy (i.e. "cold")? I'd say it benefits from mass density, i.e. more stars and black holes early on, more stuff close to each other, but I don't know how that relates to entopy at all.
I'm having a hard time with this: You say you have dips in the spectrum because some wavelength are absorbed by the specific energy levels... But you also say that anything below the maximum energy level tends to be absorbed which results in a big dip in the lower end the spectrum... But is that before the dips mentioned earlier if those dips are from energy levels that are part of the range that causes the big dip?
The graph used had wavelength as the x-axis. So it went from high energy levels on the left to lower on the right, which made the dip appear at higher energy.
The graph you're looking at is actually in the positive direction for wavelength, but the negative direction for energy. Look at the equation for a photon's energy, E = hf, and then look at the equation for the photon's speed, c = fλ. If you do enough jigging about, you get λ = ch/E. Or in other words, as the energy goes up, the wavelength goes down, and vice versa. So you're right, all the energy is absorbed the higher you go, which is further to the left on the diagram.
We'd expect the opposite, due to some of the intricacies of how star formation works. The early universe had fewer heavy elements. When you form stars, you need to collapse a cloud of gas, and to do that, you actually need some way to cool that gas. For that, you need dust, and you can't make dust without heavy elements. In other words, those clouds of gas needed to be a lot more massive in order to collapse into a star, resulting in much more large stars (and much fewer small ones).
Was there some motivation for specifically searching for massive galaxies in this redshift range? Was there reason to speculate that the prevailing theory (that such massive/early galaxies are rare) was wrong, or was this a stab in the dark?
The basic motivation was to get higher resolution and more varied images of early galaxies to test our current models of early galaxy formation. This specific set of galaxies is a sub-section of that wider effort and have shown that our models may not be correct. Other models (such as the direct collapse of supermassive stars into the earliest black holes) are also being tested and may be confirmed or ruled out entirely.
I wonder hypothetically.. If money was no object and all of the resources of human civilization were simultaneously dedicated to building one telescope.. what could we make and what could we see..
We could see a lot for sure. Optical interferometry (combining multiple optical telescopes into one big one) is a growing field, although there are a lot of challenges there to making a really big array. We have radio interferometry pretty well locked down though, I think if there was enough funding for it we could launch a bunch of radio telescopes into space and get like a million times more resolution than even the Event Horizon Telescope they used for those black hole pictures (which combined telescopes from all around the Earth).
Why are they considered red if it is the ionizing radiation coming from stars that causes the breaks? I guess the models are throwing more older stars than young ones?
I have a question... maybe I don't know enough about science in general, but what are the units of time considered when studying this, I always get confused about the mindset applied when understanding these subjects, is it the time applied only for light speed? Or is it about factoring OUR time unit into analyzing this? (I'm sorry if I sound dumb... u.u)
Primordial black holes ? About to go into a QC masters but compact binary system accretion could provide the dark matter distribution that galaxies require. Really hope people do work on PBH candidate for dark matter, all I could help thinking through the extreme Astro module is primordial black holes… over and over.
The animation at around 2:50 is pretty, but wrong. Purple isn't a spectral color. Blue would actually shift through the colors of the rainbow (green, yellow) before becoming red.
What I always wondered is why isn't there a different red shift on one side of these distant galaxies. If they are rotating then one side would be traveling toward us or a considerable amount slower than the side moving away from us thereby causing a different red shift. And wouldn't the gravity of the source galaxy actually cause a red shift as well, especially after working on that light for a few billion years? Then you have to add in the blue shift caused by our galaxy pulling on the light for billions of years too.
IIRC this is a thing, yes. And on nearby galaxies you can absolutely measure those differences to help get at things like rotational speeds and such. But we don't have the resolution needed to do those kinds of measurements with really distance objects. Look at the pictures they talked about at the end there - these objects are literally 6-8 pixels across at best. Everything in that light becomes a mixed average of the everything coming out of the galaxy as a whole.
@@jellorelic Even then they're only 6 to 8 pixels because they're bright enough to bleed over into adjacent cells of the sensor. In terms of actual resolution they're smaller than a single pixel.
Generally mergers reinvigorate a galaxy, causing new stars to form. The galaxy itself, especially if it's a binary merger, will tend to keep evidence of that merger as well.
Professor's Mike honesty is the main theme of this episode. The last statements are crucial for the health of science. Especially in that particular field. The sad part is that all those questions and contradictions will never be answered and resolved. Scientific method can be applied here only to some extend but to me the main issues are in physical processes and equations attached. It is not the first time that the main theoretical assumption fails after a new observation arrives. I mean the assumption that only gravity shapes celestial bodies and their interactions. I would start looking for pitfalls there. In fact it is the very beginning of the story.
All the simulations of galaxy formation I’ve seen are of a disperse soup of material; though as I understand it the very early universe was very dense, to where fusion and black holes happened not just inside the hearts of stars. Cuz that’s where and when those supermassive black holes at galactic centers formed, right? Wouldn’t it make sense that, after the formation of these galactic cores, but before the universe got as sparse as it would be by the galactic era, the supermassive black holes kept a lot of the mass around then? Like, their gravity held onto the dense matter against inflation, so the earliest galaxies would have started out with a lot more mass?
Possibly. Currently there's a spread of models for the early universe, from primordial black holes to massive stars collapsing to entire galactic nuclei forming a single massive starlike object that collapses. Each produces galaxies of different mass spreads at different rates. This current data should help us pick which models and ideas operated in our early universe.
Prefer the "Not even wrong " approach when precision observation is done "truly", with procedural correctness, accuracy to the best of ability, and yet does not correspond to Theoretical expectations. The missing ability to explain is probably the functional phenomenon of quantization amplitude and frequency interpretation in the context of holography Actuality. (?) Happy work for students.
There is a third thing that could be wrong isn't there? Very unlikely since so much other evidence agrees, but we could be wrong about the age of the universe.
To ad-hoc or not to ad-hoc... this shouldn't be a thing in the first place... maybe after 2 maybe 3 failed predictions is when you should scrap the model. Yet here we are 1 correct prediction out of 20?+?
As well as the Lyman and Balmer, if you spot the Amen Break in your spectra then you can confidently date the galaxy's formation to no earlier than 1969.
While the explanation was enlightening, I loved the last part the most, starting at 11:04. Something could be wrong. And then see the excitement and humbleness of the scientist delving in how his/our understanding might be wrong, closing in his preference to study nearby galaxies because they look nice. This gave the video a wholesome human touch.
Really appreciate Dr. Merrifield's clear explanations of this stuff. Can't wait for more JWST data and more explanations. We'll be wrong about more stuff, and I am here for it! :)
Didn't those early stars tend to be more massive? Could that mean that the 200 million years for the big stars to explode number could be wrong for the earliest galaxies? Or do we always get a certain number of stars that need 200 million years to explode?
Very likely the best explanation about these distant mysterious galaxies I’ve heard so far on any of the astronomy/physics UA-cam channels I subscribe to! Well done!!!!
I like to think that when we encounter extraterrestrial intelligent life, and they don't know as much as we know, we will teach them with markers drawn on printer paper.
I gotta say as someone who considers switching to science journalism Brady is one of the biggest inspirations I have had for a long time. It's always excellent especially in a field where there a so many people doing it badly. If you read this thank you!
Magnificent video! Thanks for keeping it current and not dumbing things down too much. Would love to know more about the limit of how far back we can measure objects VS time of Big Bang.
This is really interesting, but as a layperson, I gotta say my immediate concern would be...we have Red Shift, AND we have the contention that these galaxies are red as a separate feature? That's SO much red! How do we know which red is which???
It _is_ possible to explain difficult science in a correct, non-spectacular, non-oversimplified, not-pr-like yet interesting way to everyone interested in the subject. My compliments for every video so far.
Agreed... Everyone in Brady's Bunch all do a fantastic job of explaining their field so well.
press releases are PR . you need to read offical papers to know the thing .
@@Q_QQ_Q press release is also PR 🤯
@@Q_QQ_Q Official papers are not written for the general public, and are typically quite hard to understand.
All of the contributors are great, but I really like Professor Merrifields ability to break down these truly complex facts.
It feels so weird to have grown up watching Sixty Symbols as a kid and then as a grad student wind up being part of a work that gets covered here 😅
I think that's great!
ᕙ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)ᕗ
wow congrats!
Is this show that old?
@@evionlast The first videos on this channel came out 14 years ago, so definitely possible for a grad student to have watched as a kid..
2:53 - Whoever does those animations really needs to be told that *redshift (of something that starts out blue) doesn't go **_through_** purple.* It's (at least) the second time they make something go blue -> magenta-> red, which is the _opposite_ of the way redshift works. It would go blue -> green -> yellow -> red (progressively *increasing* wavelengths / decreasing frequencies).
In fact, magenta isn't a wavelength at all, it's just the way our brain interprets a mix of frequencies at the low and high end of our visible visible spectrum (i.e., red and blue/violet), in the absence of mid-range frequencies (i.e., yellow / green). If you're doing a colour shift to illustrate some physical property and going _through_ magenta, you're doing something wrong.
I knew I wasn't the only one to notice that!
Yeah, they need to interpolate the transition in counterclockwise HSV space rather than RGB space.
Yeah, what the heck? That's basic ROYGBIV-level stuff.
@@DrMackSplackem - I suspect whever did the animation just through "redshift" meant "add some red".
@@RFC-3514 LOL. I agree, that's most likely what they/them did.
It's actually cool when science and discovery throws you for a loop and is not exactly what you expected
I think that's what makes science so exciting! 🎉
Wow, this video is an amazing explanation. I saw another video about lyman-alpha breaks (going over similar observations from JWST) and I sort of got it, but this gives a really great explanation of how it occurs and what the double break means. Thanks!
Agreed! This is by far the best explanation I've ever seen. He explained the lyman-alpha break in a great set of steps. 1. all energies above a certain level will ionize the atom, absorbing all of the radiation. 2. the spectrum will have a drop, a cliff, as you move to the left, at the point where all of the radiation starts being absorbed. 3. because the spectrum's y-axis is the intensity of the radiation. 4. (exercise for the viewer) and because the spectrum's x-axis is wavelength, which is inversely proportional to energy. The shorter wavelengths as you go left are higher energies. I could do that step 4 on my own because I finally understood 1, 2, and 3. Awesome!
Mike Merrifield is just awesome at explaining the most intricate theories. Thank you so much.
It's good to see a fresh Sixty Symbols on the channel. Thank you! 👍🏼
Crazy nice explanation
Thanks
This is the best explanation of the wavelength breaks I’ve ever heard. I feel like I finally understand 😅
What a Beautiful explanation!
Thank you. I needed all of this reasoning part of the argument.
What I like most is how Prof. Merrifield gets *most* excited when Brady asks him what could potentially be *wrong* with his own work at about 11:03. That is a sort of concentrated form of the spirit of inquiry as seen through facial expression and gesture.
It's incredible how much can be resolved from so little signal - a few pictures in different wavelengths and a few very clever people with the right tools can break the current understanding of galaxy formation. Remarkable.
Brilliant. Clear crisp and entertaining !!
Amazing video. I hope to see an update about this paper in the future :)
Great explanation of "the problem" that even a knuckle dragger like me could somewhat understand.
Thank you for explaining the double break. Seems intuitive in hindsight.
Best explanation of why ionized gas is opaque I've ever heard and the video just got started!
Great video, thanks!
I mean, it would be pretty boring if JWST just confirmed our existing theories.
Fantastic video!
The JWST finding galaxies so close to when the Big Bang is supposed to have occurred is like taking someone to an island that is supposed to of never had human habitation and when you get there you find a shopping mall.
best channel on yt. thanks fellas
I always wondered how you attribute a red shifted transmission line to a specific element. But I guess sufficient resolution as well as multiple peaks is the way to go.
Mike Merrifield is my favorite Professor
Fascinating!
just fantastic.
Is it right to say that the closer the light spectrum to the (lyman, balmer, ...) breaks, the easier it its to identify the object and how far it is?
Of course the observation is not wrong, the problem lies in the theories. But the explanations are beaten into the astronomers probably since childhood. So its difficult for them to go outside, and seek a new fundamental explanation. This is good that it shakes out the flaws.
2:50 that animation showed red shifting through the blue part of the spectrum, instead of the yellow part...
It's even worse than that, it showed it shifting through _magenta,_ which isn't part of the spectrum at all.
I'd solidly bet that there's more to redshift than the Doppler effect. An "intrinsic" redshift.
Professor Copeland would smack you for drawing a hydrogen atom as a nucleus with a little ball orbiting around it.
My intuition is that early galaxies would coalesce and grow in the early universe significantly faster than they could later. The density of mass to accrete was much higher and had much shorter distance to travel to clump up. It could have been quite reasonable for some to form within the first couple hundred million years.
Was this not actually the case? Has it been shown that the galaxies didn't form much faster?
From what i understand, the longer the wavelength the harder it is to resolve fine details. Does it mean we get less "features"/information when looking at extremely far objects?
It's correct that the same aperture of a telescope will provide less resolution at longer wavelengths.
Not connected to this video, but please do a video on Ho'oleilana.
Didn’t stars come before galaxies? Couldn’t these stars have come before they all gathered together to form a galaxy
Yes, galaxies are formed by stars.
But it isn't stars we're looking at in these plots and images - it's the galaxies.
We really can't see single stars that far away.
@@d5uncr agreed and if they were simply random early stars, they would be evenly distributed everywhere you pointed the JWST as opposed to clumped together as you see in the photos of the galaxies in the video.
Is it possible that early galaxies had a higher proportion of red dwarf stars than modern galaxies? If they did, would the light from those stars be so red shifted that we have no instruments capable of seeing them at all? How would that affect the mass calculations of early galaxies?
I wonder how early universe SMBHs have to do with this unexpected result. Maybe if their masses were higher than previously thought at this stage.
Presentation sir is impeccable I have heard and seen a true erudite
I am wondering if we expect to finally find population III stars with the JWST.
If the electron is ionized and has been torn away from the atom, what is then absorbing the energy? As I understand it, the protons can't do that, only the electrons. But, do they still have higher energy states if they are no longer a part of an atom?
Maybe the universe has always existed and it's pouring in from a place similar to the one it's pouring out.
I do not understand. If the edge of the visible universe is the beginning of time, how can that increasingly large sphere of galaxies all fit back into the tinier sphere 1,100³ times smaller ?
The observations are not wrong. But our interpretation of the redshift is. We took for granted that the fabric of our own galactic plane, doesnt distort the photon image. But it does! The recent EHT image of sag a* clearly proves a quantum effect is taken place turning the image of the centre of our galaxy 90 degrees rotated. Likewise we will have a distorted image of our outward view of the cosmos, as a QP effect would also entail the inverse arrow of time when looking out. Meaning a cosmoc redshift os actually a blue shift. Which means galaxies are heading towards us, not away. Likewise they are NOT related to a big bang event so they could be much older than we think. Problem solved. Next please.
But how are they determining the galaxy masses with such certainty of measurements ?
If they build a Space Telescope for the microwave\mm bands the same effect will appear. There was no big bang. CMBR also disproves BBT because CMBR maps change every year which is not possible. Most of the CMBR comes from inside the milky way. The better the instruments get, the older the universe gets.
So this is saying that stars formed and started going through their lifecycle, *before* the hydrogen recombination that released the CMB?
No. It's saying that galaxies several hundred million years after the CMB are surprisingly bright and large for what we expect from current models. No visible light signal 'behind' the CMB should exist, since that involved a universe-wide 'fog' that scattered all light.
Seeee red was first all the time :D ❤️
Halton Arp would probably disagree. I'd love to know why he is wrong....
The early universe was just more dense than mainstream theory suggests. Not just large galaxies existed (data) but surely lots of primeval black holes (which, if Hawking radiation is wrong, could account for Dark Matter today).
Also the population surveys that discredit black holes as dark matter require their mass range be the same size as the collisions we observe in LIGO, which suggests there is a non-trivial population of this mass range of black holes.
But no... it is WIMPs just build a bigger collider we'll see them this time I swear 😂
@@hugmynutus - The Emperor's WIMPs, soon to be found after budget is exhausted into yet another larger collider, famous European tale... 😂
Anyway, I'm not sure I understand the issue of LIGO ranges you mention. I know that LIGO/Libra can only detect certain ranges of mergers (always mergers and never single BHs or neutron stars) but those are anyhow quite large in scope, right? I say judging on the results, which include a vast array of sizes for the merging BHs including some that are hyperbolically deemed "impossible". So are you talking of too small BHs to be detected by LIGO? and, in that case, what about microlensing surveys, which reportedly seem to discard the existance of many primeval BHs, at least in our vicinity?
In any case, glad to find another mind who is able to question the "quantum hack" of Hawking Radiation being real (without any clear evidence even prospective one). Ironically Hawking himself (who deserves all respect even if possibly wrong on this issue) actually defended BHs as DM candidates in 2014.
Entropy was higher. Anything that requires energy including galaxy formation could occur easier when Entropy is higher
@@drsatan9617 - Should be lower: entropy increases with time.
Also, why galaxy formation benefit from high entropy (i.e. "cold")?
I'd say it benefits from mass density, i.e. more stars and black holes early on, more stuff close to each other, but I don't know how that relates to entopy at all.
Yes!
I'm having a hard time with this: You say you have dips in the spectrum because some wavelength are absorbed by the specific energy levels... But you also say that anything below the maximum energy level tends to be absorbed which results in a big dip in the lower end the spectrum... But is that before the dips mentioned earlier if those dips are from energy levels that are part of the range that causes the big dip?
The graph used had wavelength as the x-axis. So it went from high energy levels on the left to lower on the right, which made the dip appear at higher energy.
The graph you're looking at is actually in the positive direction for wavelength, but the negative direction for energy.
Look at the equation for a photon's energy, E = hf, and then look at the equation for the photon's speed, c = fλ. If you do enough jigging about, you get λ = ch/E. Or in other words, as the energy goes up, the wavelength goes down, and vice versa. So you're right, all the energy is absorbed the higher you go, which is further to the left on the diagram.
He knows what he's talking about
Is there really a big problem being “off” by a factor of 2 regarding anything like distance or time in the very early Universe?
Dr. Mike talks about Ballmer Breaks, but there needs to be awareness about the Ballmer Peak 😉
Any chance massive stars were just less likely to form in the early universe?
We'd expect the opposite, due to some of the intricacies of how star formation works.
The early universe had fewer heavy elements. When you form stars, you need to collapse a cloud of gas, and to do that, you actually need some way to cool that gas. For that, you need dust, and you can't make dust without heavy elements. In other words, those clouds of gas needed to be a lot more massive in order to collapse into a star, resulting in much more large stars (and much fewer small ones).
Was there some motivation for specifically searching for massive galaxies in this redshift range? Was there reason to speculate that the prevailing theory (that such massive/early galaxies are rare) was wrong, or was this a stab in the dark?
The basic motivation was to get higher resolution and more varied images of early galaxies to test our current models of early galaxy formation. This specific set of galaxies is a sub-section of that wider effort and have shown that our models may not be correct. Other models (such as the direct collapse of supermassive stars into the earliest black holes) are also being tested and may be confirmed or ruled out entirely.
I wonder hypothetically.. If money was no object and all of the resources of human civilization were simultaneously dedicated to building one telescope.. what could we make and what could we see..
We would see ourselves starve and go extinct because we wasted all our resources on a telescope instead of food and shelter.
We could see a lot for sure. Optical interferometry (combining multiple optical telescopes into one big one) is a growing field, although there are a lot of challenges there to making a really big array. We have radio interferometry pretty well locked down though, I think if there was enough funding for it we could launch a bunch of radio telescopes into space and get like a million times more resolution than even the Event Horizon Telescope they used for those black hole pictures (which combined telescopes from all around the Earth).
Why are they considered red if it is the ionizing radiation coming from stars that causes the breaks? I guess the models are throwing more older stars than young ones?
Because the radiation was ionizing (blue) when it was created, but appears lower energy (red) now. The galaxies LOOK red now, so we call them red.
I have a question... maybe I don't know enough about science in general, but what are the units of time considered when studying this, I always get confused about the mindset applied when understanding these subjects, is it the time applied only for light speed? Or is it about factoring OUR time unit into analyzing this? (I'm sorry if I sound dumb... u.u)
Primordial black holes ? About to go into a QC masters but compact binary system accretion could provide the dark matter distribution that galaxies require. Really hope people do work on PBH candidate for dark matter, all I could help thinking through the extreme Astro module is primordial black holes… over and over.
Someone needs to constrain the possible PBH that could possibly cause this aging, then use similar data to predict galaxy rotation curves.
Could also predict the missing emission lines of compact binary accretion systems
The animation at around 2:50 is pretty, but wrong. Purple isn't a spectral color. Blue would actually shift through the colors of the rainbow (green, yellow) before becoming red.
What I always wondered is why isn't there a different red shift on one side of these distant galaxies.
If they are rotating then one side would be traveling toward us or a considerable amount slower than the side moving away from us thereby causing a different red shift.
And wouldn't the gravity of the source galaxy actually cause a red shift as well, especially after working on that light for a few billion years?
Then you have to add in the blue shift caused by our galaxy pulling on the light for billions of years too.
I have a feeling we've discussed this either here or on Deep Sky Videos? ua-cam.com/users/deepskyvideos
IIRC this is a thing, yes. And on nearby galaxies you can absolutely measure those differences to help get at things like rotational speeds and such. But we don't have the resolution needed to do those kinds of measurements with really distance objects. Look at the pictures they talked about at the end there - these objects are literally 6-8 pixels across at best. Everything in that light becomes a mixed average of the everything coming out of the galaxy as a whole.
@@jellorelic Even then they're only 6 to 8 pixels because they're bright enough to bleed over into adjacent cells of the sensor. In terms of actual resolution they're smaller than a single pixel.
Hello!
These galaxies are obviously embarrassed over arriving early.
Can't two (or more) old small galaxies merge to become what is now seen as a massive old one ?
From my understanding that leads to a burst of new star formation in the newly merged galaxy.
Generally mergers reinvigorate a galaxy, causing new stars to form. The galaxy itself, especially if it's a binary merger, will tend to keep evidence of that merger as well.
Professor's Mike honesty is the main theme of this episode. The last statements are crucial for the health of science. Especially in that particular field. The sad part is that all those questions and contradictions will never be answered and resolved. Scientific method can be applied here only to some extend but to me the main issues are in physical processes and equations attached. It is not the first time that the main theoretical assumption fails after a new observation arrives. I mean the assumption that only gravity shapes celestial bodies and their interactions. I would start looking for pitfalls there. In fact it is the very beginning of the story.
Ah, things were just closer together back then.. closer relative to atom size anyway. Mergers were just easier then.
All the simulations of galaxy formation I’ve seen are of a disperse soup of material; though as I understand it the very early universe was very dense, to where fusion and black holes happened not just inside the hearts of stars. Cuz that’s where and when those supermassive black holes at galactic centers formed, right?
Wouldn’t it make sense that, after the formation of these galactic cores, but before the universe got as sparse as it would be by the galactic era, the supermassive black holes kept a lot of the mass around then? Like, their gravity held onto the dense matter against inflation, so the earliest galaxies would have started out with a lot more mass?
Possibly. Currently there's a spread of models for the early universe, from primordial black holes to massive stars collapsing to entire galactic nuclei forming a single massive starlike object that collapses. Each produces galaxies of different mass spreads at different rates. This current data should help us pick which models and ideas operated in our early universe.
Prefer the "Not even wrong " approach when precision observation is done "truly", with procedural correctness, accuracy to the best of ability, and yet does not correspond to Theoretical expectations.
The missing ability to explain is probably the functional phenomenon of quantization amplitude and frequency interpretation in the context of holography Actuality. (?)
Happy work for students.
There is a third thing that could be wrong isn't there? Very unlikely since so much other evidence agrees, but we could be wrong about the age of the universe.
Early crew!
This could easily be explained with dark time.
Something something electric universe
It's weird how English speakers used to say strange and now they say weird.
Are you SURE you're looking at galaxies or something else?
Purple Brain
Galaxy formation is fine. The timeline of LCDM is the bad thing.
To ad-hoc or not to ad-hoc... this shouldn't be a thing in the first place... maybe after 2 maybe 3 failed predictions is when you should scrap the model. Yet here we are 1 correct prediction out of 20?+?
Do you have a better model?
Conformal cyclic cosmology
Firstish
First!
Tell him what he’s won…
You seem to be first for me.. do you want a teddy or a toffee apple?
As well as the Lyman and Balmer, if you spot the Amen Break in your spectra then you can confidently date the galaxy's formation to no earlier than 1969.
I hope this comment gets the appreciation it deserves.
@@renerpho Oh, brother...
And then you've also got the Ballmer peak.
I love that I understood the reference
Thanks I can never get amenbreaks out of my head-
only 12 minutes ?? i can watch Mike for hours !
Mike Merrifield is the platonic ideal form of a science educator.
They say his brain is a perfect sphere
@@DrKaii smooth brain best brain
Of unit radius.
false.
While the explanation was enlightening, I loved the last part the most, starting at 11:04.
Something could be wrong. And then see the excitement and humbleness of the scientist delving in how his/our understanding might be wrong, closing in his preference to study nearby galaxies because they look nice. This gave the video a wholesome human touch.
Really appreciate Dr. Merrifield's clear explanations of this stuff. Can't wait for more JWST data and more explanations. We'll be wrong about more stuff, and I am here for it! :)
I love sixty symbols so much
Thank you for this.
Oh my gosh I’ve never seen ionisation described with an energy level diagram like that - that’s amazing!
Everything you said about stars doesn’t distract me from the fact that you are wearing 2 watches??????? Why????
Didn't those early stars tend to be more massive? Could that mean that the 200 million years for the big stars to explode number could be wrong for the earliest galaxies? Or do we always get a certain number of stars that need 200 million years to explode?
Very likely the best explanation about these distant mysterious galaxies I’ve heard so far on any of the astronomy/physics UA-cam channels I subscribe to! Well done!!!!
I like to think that when we encounter extraterrestrial intelligent life, and they don't know as much as we know, we will teach them with markers drawn on printer paper.
I gotta say as someone who considers switching to science journalism Brady is one of the biggest inspirations I have had for a long time. It's always excellent especially in a field where there a so many people doing it badly. If you read this thank you!
balmer break? i am only aware of the ballmer peak! 😂 Google it if you don't know 😂
Magnificent video! Thanks for keeping it current and not dumbing things down too much. Would love to know more about the limit of how far back we can measure objects VS time of Big Bang.
The limit will be 41 billion lightyears. The observable universe. These galaxies are about 30 billion light years away
My monthly dose of sixty symbols is HEERE!
This is really interesting, but as a layperson, I gotta say my immediate concern would be...we have Red Shift, AND we have the contention that these galaxies are red as a separate feature? That's SO much red! How do we know which red is which???
And THIS is how you explain things!
Sure it raised a lot of questions in the end, but that's just a good thing.
Thank you so much!