Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by astroH 1257 days ago
I have to say, this article is exceptionally disappointing. As someone who works in this space, there are numerous misleading depictions about the state of the field. Almost any respectable simulation shows that disk galaxies are widely present at very early times. This is simply an argument of angular momentum conservation and these rotational states are simply more transient at early times compared to the local Universe.

"Yan found 87 distant galaxies behind the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723" --> this is not true. They found 87 galaxy candidates. To be fair to the article, they do note that these await spectroscopic confirmation but experts only believe those with spectroscopic confirmation. Everything else is tentative and we don't yet have good numbers on confirmation rates. Finally, the Yan et al candidates are wildly inconsistent with almost every other estimate of high-redshift galaxy samples. You can see a comparison in Table 4 here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.06683.pdf. They claim more than double the number of high-redshift sources compared to everyone else. JWST data is still very new and hard to both reduce and analyze. One particular problem is correlated hot pixels which can appear as very high-redshift sources. I don't know if this impacts the Yan et al paper but just an example of something that is not 100% straightforward to deal with. I highly recommend people take this with a healthy amount of skepticism until everything has a spectrum.

1 comments

Honestly, thank you very much for this comment. As a lay person, I very often fall into taking such news as solid, as am kind of hoping for some great breakthroughs in cosmology (broadly speaking). Thanks for providing details. "One particular problem is correlated hot pixels" has a nice, cooling effect on me and I get the idea that it is an unsolved issue (kind of get it). Same with "experts only believe those with spectroscopic confirmation" - fair enough. An antidote for getting fooled in this way by such articles (or YT video beating some popular notions over and over) is to read core material (like books) and seek some actual lectures, I think. That's a pity you can't skim some topic and have it right. You just can't and it only fills you with fake knowledge.
The need of counterpoints and different views are important especially in academic field. But some debates got us lost as well. I would not say bad against YT but more about lack of quality one. Hope that will come.

Take an example of MONO discussed below. One claimed it is right but wrong in other prediction.

“ So MOND does predict more galaxies at high redshift however it also predicts earlier reionization than LCDM which it turns out not to be true and the mass function of clusters is not what we see purely based on X-ray temperatures. So getting one thing right at the expense of many others doesn't make this particularly viable.”

But the major discussion shifted to dark energy and refracted … and totally ignored that wrong predictions by mono … it is just hard to follow the threads.

But more discussion may help.