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Tiny bright objects discovered at dawn of universe baffle scientists
The saga continues of JWST observations failing to align with accepted theory. Scientists are "baffled". A few great quotes from the article, at least for those wanting to challenge the paradigm, and the authority of cosmologists:
"It's very confusing," said Joel Leja, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State and co-author on both papers. "You can make this uncomfortably fit in our current model of the universe, but only if we evoke some exotic, insanely rapid formation at the beginning of time. This is, without a doubt, the most peculiar and interesting set of objects I've seen in my career."
"There's another way that we could have a breakthrough, and that's just the right idea," Leja said. "We have all these puzzle pieces and they only fit if we ignore the fact that some of them are breaking. This problem is amenable to a stroke of genius that has so far eluded us, all of our collaborators and the entire scientific community."
"We have confirmed that these appear to be packed with ancient stars -- hundreds of millions of years old -- in a universe that is only 600-800 million years old. Remarkably, these objects hold the record for the earliest signatures of old starlight," said Bingjie Wang, a postdoctoral scholar at Penn State and lead author on the paper. "It was totally unexpected to find old stars in a very young universe. The standard models of cosmology and galaxy formation have been incredibly successful, yet, these luminous objects do not quite fit comfortably into those theories."
One challenge to analyzing ancient light is that it can be hard to differentiate between the types of objects that could have emitted the light. In the case of these early objects, they have clear characteristics of both supermassive black holes and old stars. However, Wang explained, it's not yet clear how much of the observed light comes from each -- meaning these could be early galaxies that are unexpectedly old and more massive even than our own Milky Way, forming far earlier than models predict, or they could be more normal-mass galaxies with "overmassive" black holes, roughly 100 to 1,000 times more massive than such a galaxy would have today.
Tracing the evolution of ferns' surprisingly sweet defense strategy
Ferns and flowering plants supposedly both evolved ant-plant mutualism despite being separated by 400 million years of evolutionary history.
Bragg drops trespassing charges against nearly all Columbia protesters
Short version: 31 of 46 cases are being immediately dismissed, due to "lack of evidence", i.e., no camera footage and, evidently, no serious investigation. 14 more will be dismissed if the protestor is well-behaved for six months.
Migrant charged with murder of 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray was released into US just weeks ago