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JWST Spots Giant Black Holes All Over the Early Universe | Quanta Magazine (www.quantamagazine.org)

submitted 2 years ago by trashhalo@beehaw.org to c/science@beehaw.org

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Observations from the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed a surprising number of young galaxies containing massive black holes at their centers, churning up the gas within only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Spectroscopic data indicates that these "hidden little monsters" harbor black holes weighing millions of solar masses. The abundance of growing baby black holes challenges theories about how supermassive black holes could have formed so early in the universe's history. While astrophysicists expected JWST to find some early black holes, the sheer number uncovered has shocked astronomers and could rewrite models of galaxy and black hole formation. If confirmed, these observations suggest that massive black holes may have grown much faster than previously believed possible in the infant universe.

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[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (5 children)

No, I'm not a physicist, but I think you might be mixing the term up with something else (phantom energy maybe?). Inflation is a critical part of the standard big bang cosmology; it's (thought to be) how things got so smooth in the first place. See the wiki here.

[–] A_A@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (4 children)

Under this very article you provided you can read, at criticism :
At a conference in 2015, Penrose said :

"inflation isn't falsifiable, it's falsified. ... BICEP did a wonderful service by bringing all the Inflation-ists out of their shell, and giving them a black eye." (...) Penrose's shocking conclusion, though, was that obtaining a flat universe without inflation is much more likely than with inflation – "by a factor of 10 to the googol power!"

Please read about this guy :

Roger Penrose (...) mathematician, mathematical physicist, philosopher of science and Nobel Laureate in Physics.

I read much more than the average person about it and my experience & education allows me to know how scientific research works. The fact is, not only inflation but Lambda CDM is dead.

There is a lot more to say about it.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Penrose is also pretty controversial. I didn't know he was dead-set against standard cosmology but I'm not surprised.

Most cosmologists still assumed LCDM, at least up until JWST started throwing spanners into the works. Notice the tone the Wiki article takes, it uses words like "believed" instead of "proposes". I'm curious what Penrose prefers.

Edit: It looks like he prefers his own Weyl curvature hypothesis, which I'll have to read up on. This is his subfield so he gets to have big ideas.

[–] A_A@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 years ago

I like what you say. So, in a few minutes I will make a new root comment inside this post so you could continue this thread some more with me.

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