• JWST sees the sea of galaxies in all its glory at last!

    From Jacob Navia@21:1/5 to All on Sat Aug 20 23:42:02 2022
    [[Mod. note -- I'm sorry for the delay in processing this article, which reached the moderation system on 2021-08-18. -- jt]]

    https://www.science.org/content/article/webb-telescope-reveals-unpredicted-bounty-bright-galaxies-early-universe

    <quote>
    The James Webb Space Telescope has only been watching the sky for a few
    weeks, and it has already delivered a startling finding: tens, hundreds,
    maybe even 1000 times more bright galaxies in the early universe than astronomers anticipated.

    ...

    Within days after Webb began observations, it spotted a candidate galaxy
    that appears to have been shining brightly when the universe was just 230 million years old, 1.7% of its current age, which would make it the most distant ever seen. Surveys since then have shown that object is just one of
    a stunning profusion of early galaxies, each small by today=E2=80=99s standards, but more luminous than astronomers had expected.

    ...
    something may be wrong in the current understanding of how the universe
    evolves
    </quote>

    Well, this confirms what I have been thinking all the time since several
    years. Maybe there is no "Big Bang" but a gargantuan gas cloud that started
    to condense into galaxies 16, or 17 Gy ago.

    Or maybe not, since we see the brightest ones at those enormous distances,
    it is normal that we see the bright and younger ones. JWST has started observing a few weeks ago. Maybe we will find old galaxies at100 My after
    the supposed "bang" soon. The current record holder that I mentioned in
    this group was at 230 My and it is but one of " a stunning profusion of
    early galaxies," See "On the stunning abundance of super-early, massive galaxies revealed by JWST" https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.00720

    VERY interesting times.

    jacob

    [[Mod. note -- These are indeed exciting times to be an astronomer.

    However, I think your hypothesis
    Maybe there is no "Big Bang" but a gargantuan gas cloud that started
    to condense into galaxies 16, or 17 Gy ago.
    is falsified by the observation that the cosmic microwave temperature
    was higher at high redshifts than it is today. A few references for
    these observations are
    (1) Srianand, Petitjean & Ledoux, Nature 408, 931 (2000),
    "The cosmic microwave background radiation temperature at
    a redshift of 2.34";
    (2) Ge et al., Astrophysical Journal 474 (1997) 67,
    astro-ph/9607145);
    (3) Noterdaeme et al, http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.3164,
    accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics Letters;
    (4) Sato et al, http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.5625,
    accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

    That is, if we observe a galaxy at redshift 2.34 (say), and we know
    that the CMB temperature there at the time we observe that galaxy
    was significantly different from (larger than) today's 2.73 K, that
    implies that we can't explain cosmological redshifts by a simple
    expansion in a flat unchanging space -- there must have been an overall expansion of space in ordre to redshift that higher temperature down
    to today's 2.73 K.
    -- jt]]

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