“We haven’t really figured out the chemistry part of the puzzle yet,” said Vos. “But these results are really exciting because they are showing us that the abundances of molecules like methane and carbon dioxide could change from place to place and over time. If we are looking at an exoplanet and can get only one measurement, we need to consider that it might not be representative of the entire planet.”
Especially important because exoplanet transit spectroscopy can only look at a planet at one specific phase (time of year, seasonally), when the star and planet line up from the POV of Earth.
Gonna hijack this post to ask a somewhat related but possibly stupid question, would it be possible that instead of a singularity there happened to be a region of space with non-negligible size (ie, not a point sized region) that acted like a well instead? Things could “fall” into that well and not be able to escape, but it’s not like everything in the well is at a single point.
I may be misunderstanding your question, but black holes are regions of space that have non-negligible size; the boundary between what can escape and what can’t is called the event horizon. The singularity is what happens at the center.
I guess what I mean to say is, would a non-negligible sized “singularity” (I know I’m messing with that term quite a bit, I’ll stray from the mathematical definition) be consistent with our current theories?
Basically, what makes sense logically isn’t backed up by what data and math we have. Logically, we would assume as enough stuff is pulled together that the density hits a point where gravity is stronger than the bonds that hold matter together, that those bonds would break and the individual elements, initially atoms, but as gravity gets stronger and stronger the bonds between the components of atoms and so on and so forth also break down.
At some point, there is a limit to how much matter can break back down into further and further smaller components. What specifically happens when that limit is reached? That is a huge part of what could be throwing the math off. We don’t really know, but we have some guesses. Could be at the end, one of the components is weightless, and unaffected by the gravity, we do see some energy radiating out of some black holes in a straight line or “jet”. Hard to say for sure. Logic doesn’t always get us there when we don’t have enough data and need to make a leap. It might eventually, as we can slowly tie more and more stuff together with more data. Could be whatever energy starts that jet either immediately or already on the way out, mixes/mixed with other components and particles to become what we end up detecting it as. But if we could see it earlier, it maybe would be completely different before that.
Depends what you mean by “our current theories”. In classical General Relatively the answer is pretty conclusively no but many people think that a quantum theory of gravity should be able to remove the singularities. In fact, this article is about an attempt to do just that with a fairly natural extension to GR (albeit one that is only mathematically tractable in 5 or more dimensions) and seems to have succeeded for the static spherically symmetric case at least.
Nobody really thinks singularities exist. It’s only what comes out from our math. That’s also how we know our math is wrong, we’re just not sure yet how to do it better.
Ok so from what I can understand it blew off approximately a million years ago, and now it’s about 8.8k ly away. But where was it in relation to earth when it exploded?
Ok so from what I can understand it blew off approximately a million years ago, and now it’s about 8.8k ly away. But where was it in relation to earth when it exploded?
Putting on my sci-fi hat; a distant galaxy that is likely a billion years older than ours, very likely has had enough time to develop life somewhere in the trillions of stars that formed within it, by the time the photons of that galaxy finally reached us and hit that very specific telescope sensor at that very specific moment the JWT engineers were observing.
Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international team of astronomers has detected a new grand-design spiral galaxy as part of the PANORAMIC survey. The newfound galaxy, named Zhúlóng, is extremely massive and appears to be the most distant spiral galaxy identified so far. The finding was detailed in a paper published December 17 on the pre-print server arXiv.
Grand-design spiral galaxies are characterized by their prominent, well-defined arms, which circle outwards from a clear core. It is assumed that the arms in such galaxies are actually overdense regions of the disk which trigger star formation as incoming material is compressed in that region.
phys.org
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