![]() Penn State’s Joel Leja modeled the light from these objects, and I like the openness to alternative explanations that he injects here: That’s a pointer to what seems to be needed next. One note of caution emerges in the abstract to this work: “If verified with spectroscopy, the stellar mass density in massive galaxies would be much higher than anticipated from previous studies based on rest-frame ultraviolet-selected samples.” Brammer (Niels Bohr Institute’s Cosmic Dawn Center at the University of Copenhagen). Labbe (Swinburne University of Technology). One of the sources (bottom left) could contain as many stars as our present-day Milky Way, according to researchers, but it is 30 times more compact. Image: Images of six candidate massive galaxies, seen 500-700 million years after the Big Bang. That cannot be anything but salutary in an era when complicated ideas are routinely pared into often misleading news headlines. It’s the availability of that peer review file that, as much as the findings themselves, occasions this post, as it offers laymen like myself a chance to see the scientific publication process at work. Reading this material offers an inside look at how the scientific community tests and refines its results enroute to what may need to be a modification of previous models. The editors of Nature have helpfully made available a peer review file containing back and forth comments between the authors and reviewers that give a jeweler’s eye look at how intricate the taking of high-redshift measurements can be. That’s a surprise, and it’s fascinating to see the scrutiny to which these findings have been exposed. We’re looking at light from objects 13.5 billion years old that should be anything but mature, if compact, galaxies. Researchers examining this primordial era have found six galaxies, from no more than 500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang, that give the appearance of being massive. All that is obvious enough, but a new paper on JWST data on high-redshift galaxies is striking in its implications. ![]() That would of course include considering the possibilities of error somewhere in the observations. ![]() When something turns up in astronomical data that contradicts long accepted theory, the way forward is to proceed with caution, keep taking data and try to resolve the tension with older models. ![]()
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