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IcebergDocs t1_j49pysl wrote

until they build a bigger telescope, then they will find more that are even older.

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tornpentacle t1_j4ct7zx wrote

>earliest known

tbf, they acknowledged the possibility :-p

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TSac-O t1_j4c6taj wrote

The US Extremely Large Telescopes will come online around 2030 and are going to be game changing in discovering new worlds, galaxies and other cosmic phenomena

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Wonderful_Mud_420 t1_j4a6vv5 wrote

Some say it can be infinitely older

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teenagesadist t1_j4agikh wrote

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that the universe is about as old as it is- unless it's not.

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skofan t1_j4a9tx3 wrote

And others say that if you trace back the expansion of the universe you get a pretty decent estimate of how old a galaxy could possibly be.

But since only one of them is a testable hypothesis, i guess we'll never know which is more likely.

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thruster_fuel69 t1_j4b43d1 wrote

We're like those people in the far future who can't see any stars after they all move so far apart. We just don't have the required information available to us. At this point I see no reason to accept either as truth, so I'll just assume it's infinite. An infinite universe is insanely exciting to contemplate.

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skofan t1_j4bwkr6 wrote

sorry, ill try to be serious instead of sarcastic, this is /science after all.

a flat spacetime very much leaves the door open for an infinitely large universe, but right now we're talking about how old it is.

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thruster_fuel69 t1_j4bwxlf wrote

Infinite age is implied, space, time.. spacetime.

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skofan t1_j4c8dak wrote

its really not.

think of a black hole, at the event horizon (named such because of this effect) the escape velocity = C (causality), if you're positioned there, you will appear to be frozen in time for everyone from the outside observing, while from your perspective the entirety of the rest of time will flash by in a litteral instant.

now, since energy cant be created out of nothing, and mass is directly related to energy, if you trace back the expansion of the universe, you reach a point where the entirety of the universe had similar density to a black hole.

now, as our human concept of time is the linear passing of events through causality, and the laws of physics explicitly forbids anything prior to the expansion event to have any influence on events after, it makes no sense to talk about "time".

there may or may not have been some similar set of rules that governed the universe, im nowhere near smart enough to have an opinion on that, but unless you want to redefine what time means, it doesnt really make sense to talk about time prior to the expansion event.

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crimeo t1_j4chogw wrote

So what if it had approaching-infinite density? Big Bang does not preclude infinite age. It could have just been increasingly dense going back FOREVER.

The only special thing that happened "at the big bang" that we have direct evidence of is "radiation started occurring". If radiation simply doesn't occur at higher densities than that, then that wouldn't necessarily be the beginning of matter/energy, merely the beginning of radiation

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skofan t1_j4cip9y wrote

yes, radiation began occuring, which means that the velocity needed to escape the gravity well fell below the speed of light, also known as C, so named because its the speed of causality.

radiation occuring is the beginning of causality in our universe, as time is the passing of events, it hardly makes sense to discuss a time before causality.

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crimeo t1_j4cj6wf wrote

I disagree, if radiation was occurring before but just not escaping a gravity well, then when space expanded, that radiation should still have been there hanging around, liberated by the expansion and still there for us to detect.

It seems to be that radiation did not get trapped but didn't happen at all to even be trapped or not. Like more along the lines of "the way subatomic physics works at very high densities just doesn't make sense for radiation to be a thing, but maybe a bunch of other stuff is"

> its the speed of causality.

Also how do you know this is the case anyway, at hyper intense densities that we've never observed and thus don't know the rules of? Or that the speed of light changes that high, or become unlimited, or that things just start to teleport as the main way stuff happens, or whatever

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skofan t1_j4cszeq wrote

unless you want to redefine the word time, and its meaning or move it to a philosophical discussion sub before continuing, i refuse to have this discussion.

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crimeo t1_j4cvhky wrote

I'm not redefining time at all, it indeed makes sense and I agree that it requires causality.

The problem is that you have no way to establish that causality was not going on before the big bang, because you don't know any of the laws of physics or what the speed of light was or if there even was a maximum speed of light or if movement had different rules in general, or anything else about back then. Nobody does. Because we have no observations of it.

"Assuming this series of things that I have zero basis to assume, there would be no causality, and time requires causality, so there was no time" is obviously not a sound argument. It's valid (syllogism) but not sound (the premises cannot be established as true)

> philosophy

Science extends to saying "I don't know" to things you have no data for.

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thruster_fuel69 t1_j4c922w wrote

Ok I'm no physicist but why do we think space itself is fully contained within a bubble of what we can see? Isn't it silly to assume there's nothing outside our visible bubble when we always see more the further we look? How do we know it's space itself contracting and not just our portion of some much larger explosion?

I feel like maybe that's all explained well enough, but I also know scientists love to smell their own farts and word conjecture as fact.

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crimeo t1_j4ci1tl wrote

We know it's space itself because everything appears to be moving away from us, personally.

The only two ways that's geometrically possible is if we are actually uniquely special and the center of the entire universe, or if everything is moving away from everything else. The second one is considered the only plausible of the two options.

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marketrent OP t1_j48yf9b wrote

Findings in title quoted from linked summary released by the University of Missouri.

Excerpt:

>In a new study, a team of astronomers led by Haojing Yan at the University of Missouri used data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Early Release Observations and discovered 87 galaxies that could be the earliest known galaxies in the universe.

>The finding moves the astronomers one step closer to finding out when galaxies first appeared in the universe — about 200-400 million years after the Big Bang, said Yan, associate professor of physics and astronomy at MU and lead author on the study.

>“Finding such a large number of galaxies in the early parts of the universe suggests that we might need to revise our previous understanding of galaxy formation,” Yan said. “Our finding gives us the first indication that a lot of galaxies could have been formed in the universe much earlier than previously thought.”

>In the study, the astronomers searched for potential galaxies at “very high redshifts.” Yan said the concept of redshifts in astronomy allows astronomers to measure how far away distant objects are in the universe — like galaxies — by looking at how the colors change in the waves of light that they emit.

> 

>The JWST was critical to this discovery because objects in space like galaxies that are located at high redshifts — 11 and above — can only be detected by infrared light, according to Yan. This is beyond what NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope can detect because the Hubble telescope only sees from ultraviolet to near-infrared light.

>“JWST, the most powerful infrared telescope, has the sensitivity and resolution for the job,” Yan said. “Up until these first JWST data sets were released [in mid-July 2022], most astronomers believed that the universe should have very few galaxies beyond redshift 11.

>“At the very least, our results challenge this view. I believe this discovery is just the tip of the iceberg because the data we used only focused on a very small area of the universe.

>“After this, I anticipate that other teams of astronomers will find similar results elsewhere in the vast reaches of space as JWST continues to provide us with a new view of the deepest parts of our universe.”

Haojing Yan et al. First Batch of z ≈ 11–20 Candidate Objects Revealed by the James Webb Space Telescope Early Release Observations on SMACS 0723-73. The Astrophysical Journal Letters 942 L9 (2023). https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/aca80c

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Theseus_Indomitus t1_j49t4xn wrote

Hopefully they get it right in one of those worlds.

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Wyvernrider t1_j4a9gse wrote

How are they able to make sense of galaxies so far away that the light would be so heavily distorted from the immense spacetime between?

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skofan t1_j4a9xu8 wrote

Thats what redshift is, and they're using that "distortion" to measure the age of the galaxies.

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Wyvernrider t1_j4agei3 wrote

I'm not talking about simply the speed at which objects are moving away from each other's effect. I'm talking about the effects of all the objects in-between such as other galaxies.

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jstenoien t1_j4ahxzw wrote

Space is really REALLY empty.

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Socky_McPuppet t1_j4b61x5 wrote

Yes and the matter that is in it is not evenly distributed - it tends to bunch together, and at the largest scales, it looks like a foam, with all the matter distributed along the edges of the bubbles, and really big empty spaces in between. I mean, there's an area of space that's a billion light years across, and there's nothing in it, as far as we can tell.

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aris_ada t1_j4arvf4 wrote

Unless you're watching in a busy direction (galactic plane, galaxy clusters etc.) Space is mostly empty. The expansion of the universe does not alter the shape of far objects, but changes the redshift and also the scale.

It's very paradoxal, but starting from a certain distance/time in the past, objects start looking bigger in the sky than closer same-sized objects, because the universe was much smaller when its light was emitted. So in practice we should be able to watch the earliest galaxies of the universe.

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Riegel_Haribo t1_j4cspoc wrote

This is reporting on Yan et al, which is a paper using data of one of the first-release JWST publicity images planned by the telescope institute, and has already been called out as with issues. It is of SMACS 0723-27, one of the most significant gravitational lenses yet discovered, so yes, the warping of space-time is problematic, as galaxies are indeed amplified, stretched, multiplied by this distortion, and given in some cases a significantly deeper view than direct observation.

This should be first a study in further mapping the gravitational gradient, the nature of dark matter, and not jump right to finding redshifts from imaging. JWST's NIRCam imaging is actually a bit wrong for Lyman break astronomy at the (unexcitingly not-so-deep) redshifts being found, as the coarse transition from 200W to 277W is across two different instruments of different resolution and still faltering calibration and backgrounding even across adjacent sensors, along with cosmic ray flux and algorithmic removal that makes almost nothing pristine light.

Also it is clear that the nature of what is found early, but closer and actually resolvable, is going to create biases. Various radiance of active galactic nuclei, early formation of globular clusters, mergers, etc skew the spectra, and we still don't have spectral observations deep enough to show emission lines (Arizona paper).

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a-rock-fact t1_j4agn69 wrote

Genuine question, what does this mean (if anything) for supermassive black hole formation? Have they found, or could they even find, evidence for SBH's at the center of these galaxies? As I understand it, SBH formation is still a hot topic of debate, and the existence of these galaxies with them would put the formation of them at just a couple of hundred million years after the big bang, possibly even earlier.

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NormP t1_j4agnx2 wrote

It's quite an accomplishment. But they won't be able to push it a whole lot further. They can't see beyond the distance where (when) the universe became transparent to light (critical opalescence).

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Alternative-Flan2869 t1_j4agwg8 wrote

The more we learn, the more we discover how much we do not know.

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azdood85 t1_j4a3gqf wrote

How crazy would it be when we look further out we see other big bangs almost like our visible universe is next to another universe.

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Leonidas4494 t1_j4aasco wrote

Bruh…what kind of telescope can zoom in farther than light has traveled?

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CEW22 t1_j4abkxo wrote

Just use the CSI approach, ENHANCE!

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1fapadaythrowaway t1_j4abwd0 wrote

What’s the over/under of intelligent life out there now?

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infinityXplaind4U t1_j49f6hk wrote

"than previously thought" -not surprised;you need to understand the balance of forces to understand how the universe formed:the"three keys, light+magnetism; volume+matter; gravity+inertial resistance --all explained for the first time in my book.

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