JWST just found a 50‑million‑solar‑mass black hole 750 million years after the Big Bang, with no galaxy around it. That’s not supposed to happen under the standard “stars → galaxies → black holes” model.
It’s pure hydrogen, so it formed before nearby stars had time to seed heavier elements. That leaves a few options: primordial black hole from the Big Bang, direct collapse of a gas cloud, or a galaxy that formed and disappeared.
There are ~300 similar “little red dots” in JWST data. If most are black holes, the early universe was building them in parallel with — or before — galaxies. Either way, the neat timeline in textbooks is wrong.
Maybe, lazy or tired light, and everything shifts towards specific spectral lines or frequencies/wavelengths at distant observation.
Attenuates? Asymptotes to the hydrogen line?
If light got tired it would make ordinary chemistry impossible. You wouldn't see spectra because atoms themselves would work differently (and probably not at all).
The fact that we can tell that it's hydrogen makes it extremely unlikely that light behaved differently there.
Arguably, it makes no difference at all as to what's inside (apart from the inference that the early universe had lots of singularity seeking ponies and little green men)
Note that in spite of the name it's not a "theory" that gives an clear and accurate prediction.
We mix results of many theories, like electromagnetism, general relativity dopler effect, atoms ionization and spectrum, centripetal force, ... to get an accurate prediction and error estimation of how much mass a galaxy must have. Different calculations disagree, so we are forced to try to fix the theory (MOND) or guess there is dome difficut to see mass (dark matter).
The "blowtorch theory" is only a few general ideas and handwaving, without clear and precice calculations. So it's impossible to know if it explains all the current data (without dark matter) or even if the predictions digree so much with the current data that we need even more weird stuff to match it.
If the theory of abnormal galaxy formation hold up, then the Big Bang was spitting out both simultaneously. Maybe there’s a mathematical “tipping point” for mass where the weight of it crushes the atoms? Resulting in early black holes from abnormal matter… not from a collapse but just from mass being in close proximity. There still so much to learn…
> “tipping point” for mass where the weight of it crushes the atoms?
If you have a material of constant density like water, bananas or rocks, then if you have a ball that is big enough you get a neutron star where all the atoms collapsed in a huge-mega-super-nuclei. (I think the surface may have some normal atoms, and the center may be even more strange.) If the ball is even more big enough you get a black hole. If you use a gas like Hydrogen that has no constant density, the calculation is similar, but more complex.
IANAA, but I expect that the collapse into the black hole does not capture the 100% of the initial mass if the object is a rotating irregular blob, so in this huge cases near the big bang I expect the leftover to form something that looks like a galaxy. And the lack of leftover is what is surprising. (Again, IANAA.)
Except in neutron stars and black holes, atoms are very stable. There are many conservation laws, like the number of leptons (like the electron) and barions (like the proton/neutron) that make it hard to create weird stuff. You can create weird stuff for a very short time, but almost immediately it goes back to normal stuff. As always, there may be some surprise in particle physics, but I don't remember or expect something like this.
Primordial black holes seem likely since many models predict them. They’re not a fringe idea.
They are also a dark matter candidate, though this is more controversial. The ones we are seeing here would be huge ones but their masses could range the spectrum. Smaller ones would have evaporated already but there could be tons of asteroid, moon, and planetary mass ones around.
At least some dark matter may be black holes the size of a hydrogen atom with the mass of an asteroid, and similar objects. These would be incredibly hard to detect. The only way would be their gravitational effects on other bodies or weak anomalous radiation bursts when they rarely encounter matter.
They’re also awesome and weird. One could, for example, shoot right through the Earth. If it was small nothing might happen. Larger ones might cause seismic events or perhaps Tunguska type events due to induced fusion in the atmosphere. What was Tunguska anyway?
The most exciting thing is that if small mass PBHs exist and are common enough, we could find one someday in our solar system, maybe captured as a moon or in an asteroid belt. That would be close enough to send a probe to go look at it and do experiments with it. Being able to directly examine a black hole could be the thing that lets us “finish” physics. It would let us see conditions far beyond anything any imaginable terrestrial accelerator could ever produce.
If you draw conclusions from incomplete data, they tend to be wrong. Even Prof. van Dusen and Sherlock Holmes knew that. So if there were any difference, it would be sheer luck.
Well, the black hole isnt hydrogen. This is the gas around it. And being pure hydrogen seems sus as there should be some helium in there according to most models.
Not only that, but getting stars to form using pure hydrogen is tricky. That helium helped early stars collapse and ignite. Not seeing any helium in an early-universe object is a big deal, suggesting some sort of error.
A white hole is a completely different object, the opposite of a black hole, not a baked singularity. A white hole is an area of spacetime that no mass/energy (even light) can ever reach - versus a black hole which no mass/energy can escape.
However, my understanding of what a naked singularity means is still in conflict with the article. I understood a naked singularity to be a black hole that is larger than its event horizon, such that it's possible to reach the singularity and then come back from it.
JWST is the best thing to happen to science in decades.
Scientists having to face the fact that their theories aren't perfect and that they don't have all the answers about the universe is a good reminder that it's important to differentiate between actually settled hard science and "best guess at how this works" science.
There are still so many unanswered questions in many hard science fields like physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, etc and it's good for this new generation to not forget that.
You are regurgitating almost pure grievance against people who just want to study the universe.
Every researcher in every field all the time wants more data, better studies, more evidence. That is basically what science is.
This attitude about "those damn smug scientists who think they know everything" emerges from authoritarian nationalists selling resentment politics, and it has led to widespread violence against scientists in the past. Its prevalence in Germany is one part of why the US got the bomb first, and its prevalence in the Soviet and Chinese systems is part of why were not able to keep up with us economically (until recently).
This political project actively intends to defend enterprises like JWST (sometimes even after building and launching the damn thing!), and current budgets have dozens of existing projects being shut down for good.
Another thing people are unaware of is that the majority of scientists are experimentalists, not theoreticians. Why would we want to be experimental scientists at all?
"Scientists having to face the fact that their theories aren't perfect" - I think you fundamentally misunderstand how science works, or else you hang out with some extremely arrogant astronomers.
Why do you think they put the JWST up there, if not to get better data and thereby improve our understanding of the universe? If we thought our theories were already perfect, what would be the point in doing more research?
"Face the fact"? These scientists are very excited to find a whole new era of the universe that they don't understand:
> QSO1 and the rest of the little red dots “tell us we don’t know anything,” said John Regan, a theorist at Maynooth University in Ireland. “It has been really exciting and very electrifying for the field.”
This is pure candy to a scientist. "Holy crap, we have no idea what this object is or how it formed" was always the hoped-for outcome for the JWST. Nobody wanted to see more of the same, especially not for the price.
JWST didn't just "happen". It was conceptualized, designed, built and launched by the very scientists who wanted to test and improve their theories. No serious scientist thinks that their theories are perfect or that they have all the answers. Quite the opposite, usually. They're constantly challenging each other and themselves with the common goal of approximating reality with their models better and better. Science would never have come as far as it did if it were any different.
Where does this sheer ignorance come from? Clearly you've never worked with scientists in any capacity.
blackholes are "wormholes" across "the multiverse" but the multiverse is the historical multi-branch (i.e. non-deterministic) VersionControlSystem history of the physical evolution of whatever is "the ground of the ground (...of the ground of the ...)" all the way to the bottom (turtles is not an accepted answer unless you "speak reptilian")
JWST just found a 50‑million‑solar‑mass black hole 750 million years after the Big Bang, with no galaxy around it. That’s not supposed to happen under the standard “stars → galaxies → black holes” model.
It’s pure hydrogen, so it formed before nearby stars had time to seed heavier elements. That leaves a few options: primordial black hole from the Big Bang, direct collapse of a gas cloud, or a galaxy that formed and disappeared.
There are ~300 similar “little red dots” in JWST data. If most are black holes, the early universe was building them in parallel with — or before — galaxies. Either way, the neat timeline in textbooks is wrong.
> It’s pure hydrogen
The gas around it is pure hydrogen. We can't know what's inside. Could be stacks of little green men and ponies in there.
Maybe, lazy or tired light, and everything shifts towards specific spectral lines or frequencies/wavelengths at distant observation. Attenuates? Asymptotes to the hydrogen line?
If light got tired it would make ordinary chemistry impossible. You wouldn't see spectra because atoms themselves would work differently (and probably not at all).
The fact that we can tell that it's hydrogen makes it extremely unlikely that light behaved differently there.
that doesn't work out. from the spectra we're seeing hydrogen spikes red shifted, so the lack of any other spikes is very strong evidence
Arguably, it makes no difference at all as to what's inside (apart from the inference that the early universe had lots of singularity seeking ponies and little green men)
> the early universe was building them in parallel with — or before — galaxies
Reminds me of the "blowtorch theory"[0] discussed here on HN a while ago.
[0]: https://theeggandtherock.com/p/the-blowtorch-theory-a-new-mo...
HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44115973 (187 points | 3 months ago | 180 comments)
Note that in spite of the name it's not a "theory" that gives an clear and accurate prediction.
We mix results of many theories, like electromagnetism, general relativity dopler effect, atoms ionization and spectrum, centripetal force, ... to get an accurate prediction and error estimation of how much mass a galaxy must have. Different calculations disagree, so we are forced to try to fix the theory (MOND) or guess there is dome difficut to see mass (dark matter).
The "blowtorch theory" is only a few general ideas and handwaving, without clear and precice calculations. So it's impossible to know if it explains all the current data (without dark matter) or even if the predictions digree so much with the current data that we need even more weird stuff to match it.
If the theory of abnormal galaxy formation hold up, then the Big Bang was spitting out both simultaneously. Maybe there’s a mathematical “tipping point” for mass where the weight of it crushes the atoms? Resulting in early black holes from abnormal matter… not from a collapse but just from mass being in close proximity. There still so much to learn…
> “tipping point” for mass where the weight of it crushes the atoms?
If you have a material of constant density like water, bananas or rocks, then if you have a ball that is big enough you get a neutron star where all the atoms collapsed in a huge-mega-super-nuclei. (I think the surface may have some normal atoms, and the center may be even more strange.) If the ball is even more big enough you get a black hole. If you use a gas like Hydrogen that has no constant density, the calculation is similar, but more complex.
IANAA, but I expect that the collapse into the black hole does not capture the 100% of the initial mass if the object is a rotating irregular blob, so in this huge cases near the big bang I expect the leftover to form something that looks like a galaxy. And the lack of leftover is what is surprising. (Again, IANAA.)
Except in neutron stars and black holes, atoms are very stable. There are many conservation laws, like the number of leptons (like the electron) and barions (like the proton/neutron) that make it hard to create weird stuff. You can create weird stuff for a very short time, but almost immediately it goes back to normal stuff. As always, there may be some surprise in particle physics, but I don't remember or expect something like this.
Not to quote a 90s New Zealand pop hit but… how bizarre!
> Except in neutron stars and black holes, atoms are very stable.
Radioactive elements excepted, of course.
And when they get struck by ionizing photons.
So I would rather say: non-radioactive atomic nuclei are stable.
Radioactive atoms are just unstable atoms shedding energy to until they fall into a stable atom state.
It's not really atoms falling apart into non-atoms.
To be fair, everything is stable if we restrict ourselves to their stable subsets.
Primordial black holes seem likely since many models predict them. They’re not a fringe idea.
They are also a dark matter candidate, though this is more controversial. The ones we are seeing here would be huge ones but their masses could range the spectrum. Smaller ones would have evaporated already but there could be tons of asteroid, moon, and planetary mass ones around.
At least some dark matter may be black holes the size of a hydrogen atom with the mass of an asteroid, and similar objects. These would be incredibly hard to detect. The only way would be their gravitational effects on other bodies or weak anomalous radiation bursts when they rarely encounter matter.
They’re also awesome and weird. One could, for example, shoot right through the Earth. If it was small nothing might happen. Larger ones might cause seismic events or perhaps Tunguska type events due to induced fusion in the atmosphere. What was Tunguska anyway?
The most exciting thing is that if small mass PBHs exist and are common enough, we could find one someday in our solar system, maybe captured as a moon or in an asteroid belt. That would be close enough to send a probe to go look at it and do experiments with it. Being able to directly examine a black hole could be the thing that lets us “finish” physics. It would let us see conditions far beyond anything any imaginable terrestrial accelerator could ever produce.
Was it wrong, or based on incomplete data?
In most fields it's impossible to have complete data.
https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
If you draw conclusions from incomplete data, they tend to be wrong. Even Prof. van Dusen and Sherlock Holmes knew that. So if there were any difference, it would be sheer luck.
Both at the same time? Weird question.
Well, the black hole isnt hydrogen. This is the gas around it. And being pure hydrogen seems sus as there should be some helium in there according to most models.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_nucleosynthesis
Not only that, but getting stars to form using pure hydrogen is tricky. That helium helped early stars collapse and ignite. Not seeing any helium in an early-universe object is a big deal, suggesting some sort of error.
Bug fixes:
- Corrected an infrequent issue with getResultingProtonCount that would cause it to always return 1 for certain origin bodies.
(In the merge request comments: "This why we don't let junior devs commit unreviewed code to critical branches, guys.")
N.B. This is a supermassive black hole without a galaxy, not a naked singularity. The cosmic censorship hypothesis is still safe.
The Universe, modestly redacting its genitals from view since 0 + 1 Planck times.
I thought a naked singularity was a white hole, one without an event horizon. And physicists hate that idea, but expect to never find one anyway.
A white hole is a completely different object, the opposite of a black hole, not a baked singularity. A white hole is an area of spacetime that no mass/energy (even light) can ever reach - versus a black hole which no mass/energy can escape.
However, my understanding of what a naked singularity means is still in conflict with the article. I understood a naked singularity to be a black hole that is larger than its event horizon, such that it's possible to reach the singularity and then come back from it.
> A white hole is an area of spacetime that no mass/energy (even light) can ever reach
Would the Big Bang be a white hole?
IIRC the math is in fact very similar if not identical between a white hole and the Big Bang. But I don't actually know the math, so...
Have the black hole primal and then "naked" due to the early, rapid expansion?
”By reconstructing the vortex, the team directly measured the mass of the object it was orbiting: 50 million times more massive than our sun.”
Is that not an indirect measurement?
It is the most direct measurement that astronomers have. That said, I do agree that the word "directly" should not have been in that sentence.
Even scales measure indirectly.
Am I the only one to see HALs eye here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000
Coincidence? I don't think so. /s
JWST is the best thing to happen to science in decades.
Scientists having to face the fact that their theories aren't perfect and that they don't have all the answers about the universe is a good reminder that it's important to differentiate between actually settled hard science and "best guess at how this works" science.
There are still so many unanswered questions in many hard science fields like physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, etc and it's good for this new generation to not forget that.
You are regurgitating almost pure grievance against people who just want to study the universe.
Every researcher in every field all the time wants more data, better studies, more evidence. That is basically what science is.
This attitude about "those damn smug scientists who think they know everything" emerges from authoritarian nationalists selling resentment politics, and it has led to widespread violence against scientists in the past. Its prevalence in Germany is one part of why the US got the bomb first, and its prevalence in the Soviet and Chinese systems is part of why were not able to keep up with us economically (until recently).
This political project actively intends to defend enterprises like JWST (sometimes even after building and launching the damn thing!), and current budgets have dozens of existing projects being shut down for good.
I assume you mean "defund."
Another thing people are unaware of is that the majority of scientists are experimentalists, not theoreticians. Why would we want to be experimental scientists at all?
"Scientists having to face the fact that their theories aren't perfect" - I think you fundamentally misunderstand how science works, or else you hang out with some extremely arrogant astronomers.
Why do you think they put the JWST up there, if not to get better data and thereby improve our understanding of the universe? If we thought our theories were already perfect, what would be the point in doing more research?
"Face the fact"? These scientists are very excited to find a whole new era of the universe that they don't understand:
> QSO1 and the rest of the little red dots “tell us we don’t know anything,” said John Regan, a theorist at Maynooth University in Ireland. “It has been really exciting and very electrifying for the field.”
This is pure candy to a scientist. "Holy crap, we have no idea what this object is or how it formed" was always the hoped-for outcome for the JWST. Nobody wanted to see more of the same, especially not for the price.
We don't actually think about our theories that way. Any apparent certainty is just an illusion.
I don't even know where to begin.
JWST didn't just "happen". It was conceptualized, designed, built and launched by the very scientists who wanted to test and improve their theories. No serious scientist thinks that their theories are perfect or that they have all the answers. Quite the opposite, usually. They're constantly challenging each other and themselves with the common goal of approximating reality with their models better and better. Science would never have come as far as it did if it were any different.
Where does this sheer ignorance come from? Clearly you've never worked with scientists in any capacity.
Who do you think specified, designed and built jwst? conspiracy theorists?
blackholes are "wormholes" across "the multiverse" but the multiverse is the historical multi-branch (i.e. non-deterministic) VersionControlSystem history of the physical evolution of whatever is "the ground of the ground (...of the ground of the ...)" all the way to the bottom (turtles is not an accepted answer unless you "speak reptilian")