Far out cosmology: battling commentaries (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, February 23, 2023, 23:02 (637 days ago) @ David Turell
edited by David Turell, Thursday, February 23, 2023, 23:13

Are there giant galaxies in our early past or not:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/jwst-discovers-enormous-distant-galaxies-tha...

JWST Discovers Enormous Distant Galaxies That Should Not Exist
JWST discovers giant, mature galaxies that seem to have filled the universe shortly after the Big Bang, and astronomers are puzzled

OR

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-giant-galaxy-grew-fast-and-died-young1/

The newfound giant, known as XMM-2599, lies about 12 billion light-years from Earth, meaning that scientists are seeing the galaxy as it existed when the universe was quite young. (The Big Bang that created the universe occurred 13.82 billion years ago.)

“Even before the universe was 2 billion years old, XMM-2599 had already formed a mass of more than 300 billion suns, making it an ultramassive galaxy,” Benjamin Forrest, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California Riverside (UCR), said in a statement.

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“Even though such massive galaxies are incredibly rare at this epoch, the models do predict them,” study co-author Gillian Wilson, a physics and astronomy professor at UCR who heads the lab in which Forrest works, said in the same statement. (my bold)

Comment: I am aware of another study I've very recently read but can't seem to locate at the moment that validates the second article. My point: science reporting is not immune from sensationalizing. The science literature is enormous. Take care.

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I should be more patient. Here is the suporting missing story:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/giant-active-galaxies-early-universe-may-have-final...

Astronomers may finally have laid eyes on a population of enormous but elusive galaxies in the early universe.

These hefty, star-forming galaxies are shrouded in dust, which hid them from previous searches that used starlight. Now observations of radiation emitted by that interstellar dust have revealed dozens of massive, active galaxies from when the universe was younger than 2 billion years, researchers report online August 7 in Nature. These galaxies may be the long-sought precursors to heavyweight galaxies seen later in the universe’s history, as well as the most massive galaxies around today.