Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Did the James Webb Space Telescope disprove the Big Bang Theory?

Episode Date: September 1, 2022

Daniel and Jorge talk about the surprises found in the first science from the James Webb telescope and what it means for our understanding of the early Universe. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, Daniel, what are the chances that physics is wrong. I would guess something about 100%. A hundred percent? What do you mean? Everything you've been telling us is 100% wrong? There's a hundred percent chance that we don't have everything right. So what are we even doing here? What do we pay you for, Daniel? Well, you know, our idea right now is sure to be wrong, but it's the least wrong theory we've ever built. Well, that's good. I always aim to be the least wrong person in the room. But what does that mean? Does that mean the other theories are more than 100% wrong?

It means the long arc of science bends towards the truth, but might never actually get there. It doesn't sound like a bend at all. Sounds more like a straight line towards wrongness, or at least wrongness. No, it's a random walk-through late nights and lots of frustration. And coffee, right? Well, have you ever thought about just blowing it all up and starting from scratch? Oh, yeah, every day, that's the dream. but if only I had the right idea.

Well, it's never too late to change careers. Maybe you can be in one that's a little less least wrong. There's some joy in being wrong. Are you right about that? Probably wrong. I'm probably wrong. I am Horham a cartoonist and the co-author of Freakest, ask questions about the universe.

Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I'm an expert at being wrong. Oh, yeah? Are you not wrong about being an expert about being wrong? Well, I wrote a whole book about it with you, so I guess that qualifies me as not knowing what's going on about the universe. Well, no, the book was called We Have No Idea, not We Are Wrong.

I think you're wrong about the title of the book, Daniel. It means that all of our ideas about the universe are almost certainly wrong. And the truth that's out there is something that would shock us if we could only know it and understand it. Well, I guess that's the point of an idea. It's just an idea, right? It's not really a law or truth until you prove it. Yeah, and the process of science is iterative, right? We start with one idea.

It works for a while. Then we find some flaws and we make it better. Sometimes that's a gradual evolution of an idea to a better idea. Sometimes it's a revolution. Like when we overthrow the mechanistic universe for quantum mechanics. That's kind of a philosophical question, right? Right? If an idea is right, a little bit of the time or for a while, was it wrong in retrospect? It's really an interesting question in philosophy. What does something have to satisfy in order to be true?

Newton's theory of gravity worked really, really well. But is it true? It's hard to say that it is because it's missing one of the basic ideas about the universe, that space is a thing that bends and curves. And instead describes gravity in terms of this like fictitious force that doesn't really exist. Right, but it's right in that it works for like 98% of the situations here on Earth, right? Yeah, it certainly does work for lots of situations, but does it describe what's actually happening? Or is it just a recipe that seems to work? Yeah, and I guess also, like, how do you prove that a theory is not right, right? Like, isn't it hard to prove a negative kind of thing? It is hard, and it's even possible.

We may come up with two theories of the universe, both of which work equally well, but have different conceptual strength. structures that tell us different stories about what's going on out there in the universe. In that scenario, what do we do? Which one is true? They can't both be true if they disagree about what's happening. And yet they both work. So that's a future crisis for philosophy. Yeah, that's just what the universe needs.

A two-party system for us to devolve into political mess. But anyways, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio. In which we try to tease apart the mess that is the universe. this glorious, beautiful, incredibly wonderful mess that we find ourselves in and that we puzzle over and that we try to pull apart so that we can have some understanding of it. It seems to us to be incredible that it's possible to translate the workings of the universe into mathematical models in our minds, but somehow we have made some progress. We don't think that the answers we have are 100% correct.

In fact, we're pretty sure they're all somewhat wrong, but we're enjoying making progress and we love talking about it with you. That's right, because it is an amazing universe. And what better thing to be gloriously wrong about than the entire universe in trying to understand it? Hey, if you're going to go wrong, go big. That's right. Go a thousand percent wrong.

Or maybe infinity wrong. Yeah, and don't be wrong about tiny little things. Like, you know, when you were supposed to pick up the dry cleaning, be wrong about the fundamental nature of reality, man. Yeah, because I guess nobody can disprove you that you're right about being wrong. But joking aside, science is a process, right? We're continually refining our theories.

Sometimes we throw them out the window and start again from scratch. Because the goal is not to prove this theory or that theory. We don't have a vested interest in one particular idea. The goal is to come up with a theory that describes the universe as best as possible. And sometimes that does mean throwing out something we've been working on for decades or hundreds of years. Yeah, because I think, you know, science kind of has this image of being pretty much settled in the general public. You know, people think, oh, scientists got it. They have these theories about the origin of the universe and how big it is and whether it's flat or curved and things like that.

But actually, these things are still being debated. And any day now, there could be a result from one of our experiments or one of our observations that totally disproves everything we thought was right. That's right. There are deep questions about the universe at the smallest scale. What is everything made out of and how does it all come together to make our reality? And at the biggest scale, what is out there? How big is the universe? how did it all start?

And especially at the biggest scale, the questions about the universe, we've had a series of incredible surprises over the last few decades. As we look further out into the universe and build new eyeballs to see even deeper back into the history of our cosmos, we discover things that shock us that surprise us that really do upend our understanding of where we live. Yeah. And in fact, just recently, there was a big headline that seemed to say that everything we thought about the origin of the whole universe is made.

be wrong. And so, Daniel, you got an avalanche of comments from listeners asking us to talk about this. That's right. There was an article that whizzed around on social media claiming that maybe the Big Bang didn't happen. That maybe the latest data from our fanciest, newest eyeball, the James Webb Space Telescope, might be disproving the Big Bang. So lots of listeners wrote to me on Twitter and on email and on Discord and on every possible channel. I think I even got some skywriting asking if this was for real. Did anyone send you like actual mail?

I don't check my department mail very often like once every few months or so. There could be a whole avalanche of comments there waiting for you. I'll go check it in a minute. But yeah, this was an article that seemed to have everyone a buzz about whether or not we are right about something as fundamental as the beginning of the universe. And so today on the podcast,

we'll be asking the question. the James Webb Space Telescope disprove the big bang theory. I mean, did it explode the big bang? Isn't that sort of an oxymoron? How can you blow up a big bang, right? Can you make it bangier or bigger or bigger bangier? Yeah, you would think it if it's already banged.

But I guess you can blow up the explosion too. You'd think that the origin of the universe would be the biggest bang there could be, but still there is something to explode. The humongous bang. Maybe it just needs to be upgraded, the theory. The bigger bang. Or I guess you should go both ways.

You could have a smaller bang and the even bigger bang. So this article that seemed to cause all this stir in social media and on the internet has kind of a funny title. That's right. The title of the article is The Big Bang Didn't Happen. So that's some nice clickbait for you. And the article goes into detail about what the James Webb Space Telescope has seen and why it might cause doubt on theories that described the very, very early universe. But the article is not exactly like very strong scientific arguments. For example, it references a recent paper by a cosmologist.

The title of that paper is Panic at the Discs, which has to do with seeing very, very distant galaxies. This article refers to that as cosmologists are panicking about what they are seeing in the universe. When really, Panic at the Discs is actually just a reference to like a 2000s emo band called Panic at the Disco. So it's just a case of astronomers making bad jokes. not actual crises in the field. Wait, so let me get this straight. So the article that went viral is an article about a research paper. It's an article about some data that came from James Webb Space Telescope,

and it references this research paper as evidence that cosmologists are panicking. Oh, because the research article, you put the word panic in its title, but it was just as a joke. It's just as a joke and a reference to this astronomer's favorite band, Panic at the disco. So they saw an opportunity for a bad pun. And, you know, they took it. And I got to respect that because we do that all the time.

But in this case, it led to a bit of a misunderstanding. Oh, I see. But, you know, we're not publishing a research paper here. So why would you make a joke in a research paper? It might cause some panic, you know, like apparently it did. It's sort of the trend these days to try to come up with witty research papers. I wrote an astrophysics paper once whose title was, two lines or not two lines.

That is the question. So, you know, people make jokes sometimes in research papers. All right. So this is all kind of, it all goes back to a research paper that, and that used the work panic in the title, but maybe didn't really mean to convey panic, but it did sort of maybe mean to convey something wrong, right? That's right. There is something really interesting and weird and fascinating about the data from the James Webb Space Telescope. There really is something to dig into there. And it does raise some questions about the Big Bang. Oh, I see. I think what you're saying is that there is reason to panic, but it's just the normal. amount of panic that is involved in science.

I don't think anybody is actually panicking. People are licking their lips. This is exciting. This is what we want. You know, people aren't worried when we're about to overthrow a theory. They're excited because overthrowing a theory is like the biggest party in physics. When we can prove that something we always thought was true is wrong,

that's the moment of discovery when we're revealing something else even truer about the universe, something less wrong about our theories. So this idea that, like, physicists would be worried about a theory being overthrown, physicists would love it. Well, come on. I'm sure most physicists would love it, except the one that came up with the original theory that's being proven wrong. I'm sure that that physicist is not feeling a lot of Zen right now. Yeah, I don't know how Newton would have felt if he was in the seminar room when Einstein presented general relativity. Probably not good.

I think Newton was also famously not a very humble dude. And so probably he would have asked a very sharp question. has big egos, even physicists, right? That's true, but there are plenty of people out there who are looking to overthrow the establishment. So don't get the impression that, like, physics is desperately defending one idea. You know, we're out there trying to find the truth or trying to find cracks in our current ideas, which will lead us to the deeper truth.

That's right. Imagine a whole bunch of nerds, and they're all trying to be right. Yeah. That's the picture of science you should have in your head. Everyone's trying to one up each other. Yeah. Everyone's happy to put down the other one. Yeah, it's impossible to imagine a conspiracy of censorship keeping out the truth.

It just can't happen. Yeah, you can't get 100 nerds to agree on anything, except that the other person might be wrong. All right, well, let's dig into this because this article did cause a lot of ripples, it seems, and a lot of people are concerned maybe that the Big Bank theory is not quite right. So let's start with the basics. What is the Big Bank theory? This is a good opportunity actually to clear up some misconceptions about what the Big Bang is. I think a lot of people when they hear Big Bang, they imagine a tiny dot of dense matter in empty space,

which then blows up and that stuff flies out through the universe filling that empty space with stuff and that the Big Bang happened like in one location at one time and things have been flying out from that dot ever since. That's probably what people mostly have in their heads when they think about Big Bang. But when we talk about the Big Bang scientifically, we actually have something very different in mind. It's different in a few important ways. The first and maybe hardest to wrap your mind around is that we think the Big Bang didn't happen in one spot. We think it probably happened everywhere, that the universe was filled with this very hot, very dense matter, and that expanded and cooled and the universe became dilute, but that this happened all through the universe, not just at one point. Well, that sort of depends on what you assume is the size of the universe, right?

Like if you assume that the universe is infinite, then yeah, it was sort of like a dot everywhere all at once. But if it had a sort of a finite volume, then it really kind of was kind of a smaller dot, right? If the universe is finite but doesn't have any edges if it loops over around itself, then the Big Bang would still have happened everywhere in that finite universe at the same time. You're right that we don't know whether the universe is finite or infinite, but sense we have is that no place in the universe is special. The laws of physics are the same everywhere. So there'd be no reason for the Big Bang to happen here or there or around the corner. It should happen everywhere at once. And what we see out there in the universe is consistent

with that, with there being no center. The expansion, for example, is happening everywhere at the same time. Right. I think maybe what you're trying to say is that maybe most people think of the Big Bang as like this thing, like the universe kind of exploding. But really, it's It's more like before the Big Bang, the universe was just, there was just a lot less space. And so everything was crammed into a smaller space. And then after the Big Bang, there was just a whole lot more space. And so everything was more spread out. And the part of the universe that we can see, the observable universe, was much, much smaller.

We don't know what's beyond that. It might be that the universe is infinite and it expanded from something infinite to something more infinite. It might be that the universe is finite. We can only see a part of it. And the part of it that we can see now was much, much smaller before. this expansion, not like a tiny dot or an atom, but something much, much smaller before the expansion, right? We can look at it in the universe. We see that this expansion happened. We can dial it backwards to a much denser earlier state. But we don't think it happened in just one

location. We think it probably happened everywhere. The other important details to sort through about the Big Bang is exactly what we mean by time equals zero. Like when did the Big Bang happened? A lot of people probably imagine that we start with a gravitational singularity, a point of infinite density from which everything started and that's t equals zero that's the first moment but really the big bang theory doesn't go back that far goes back to a very hot very early very dense state but not infinitely dense we don't know how to describe something that's infinitely dense we think that's actually like a failure of general relativity we think that our theories of the universe work up to a certain temperature a certain sort of density of the universe beyond that we just don't know what to do so

when we say t equals zero when we say the big bang we really just mean we start from a very hot, very dense state, not actually infinite. We can use general relativity to try to extrapolate further back to maybe infinite density, a singularity, but we think that's probably wrong. We don't think that general relativity is applicable at those stages. Right. But I think you still put t equal zero at the point where the universe would be infinite, kind of, right?

The theory just doesn't claim to know what actually happens in that infinity. No, the Big Bang theory, we put T equal zero at the point when the universe is at the plank temperature, this highest temperature that we can imagine beyond which we don't think our theories are valid. That's what t equals zero is, is this early, very dense universe, not of the singularity, because we don't even know if there was a singularity or something else or a bounce or whatever. Extrapolate back as far as we can, which is up to the plank temperature. And that's what we say t equals zero is. And we can model our universe from that point forward. We don't know how to go any further back from that. Before that is maybe something else, like an inflaton field that

decayed into that state. Huge question mark, lots of speculation. But t equals zero, the actual Big Bang doesn't start from that singularity. It starts from the hottest, densest state that our physics can currently describe. Okay. I see what you're saying. You're saying the Big Bang theory doesn't actually start at the beginning. You just set T equals zero like a few moments or at least it starts like you're starting the movie a few minutes into the action. Yeah, we don't know how far into the action. We don't even know what time means in that state. Our laws of physics break down. there. You know, and that's because we think the laws of physics that we have are applicable in certain regimes. The way like fluid mechanics, it works for water flow, right? It doesn't really

work for gas. If you heat the water up too much, your laws of fluids are sort of useless. We think that the laws that we have are kind of like that. They are applicable in a certain temperature range of the universe. Beyond that, they're basically useless because we don't have the true fundamental theory. But we say t equals zero sort of like the earliest point that we can describe. You think maybe there was something before that, big question marks about what that might have been. Well, I'm almost certainly there were things before that, right? The T equals zero's, the stuff that was there at the equals equals zero must have come from somewhere. Must have come from somewhere.

But, you know, the spectrum of ideas is really wide. It's like maybe the universe was filled with this other kind of field, an inflaton field, which then decayed. Or maybe space didn't even exist before that, right? Maybe space itself is emergent. It comes together from quantum bits weaving themselves to, together with entanglement to form this fabric that we call space. And before that, the universe, as we know and describe it, with our laws, didn't even really exist in the same sense.

The way that, like, a fluid doesn't exist once it turns into a gas. Or maybe even time also was emergent. So there's a huge range of possible ideas for what happens sort of before t equals zero. Right. And I guess that brings me to my question, which is, like, is there actually just one Big Bank theory or is it kind of like a general family of ideas or one idea that's incomplete, but there are many different possibilities about it. Do you know what I mean? Like, is it one established theory or is it just kind of like a general idea? Great question. So before T equals

zero, there's like a wild west of theories, like a huge number of crazy ideas, some of which are super fun to talk about and we explore them in some episodes. After T equals zero, there's a pretty solid idea of describing that expansion and understanding how it's shaped the universe that we see today. And that's really very rigorous. We have measurements. We have observations. We have theories with very precise predictions about, for example, like how much helium was produced in the first minute of the Big Bang and how much lithium was produced and all this stuff, which we can actually measure and check. So after T equals zero, when we think like our laws are enforced, there really is a fairly well-established idea for what happened. I mean, still some uncertainty, still some question marks, but it really hangs together very nicely. That is until maybe this latest set of data from the James Webb Space Telescope, which some people might argue throws the whole theory into disarray.

and maybe even disproves it. So let's get into what this data is and whether or not it really does disprove the Big Bang Theory. But first, let's take a quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m.

everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our full.

focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot.

He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them.

I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend, really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was.

Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in the backlog will be identified. in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it.

He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors. And you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases, to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford. And in session 421 of therapy for black girls, I sit down with Dr. Athea and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system, right? In terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual, believe. But I think with social media, there's like a hyper fixation and observation of our hair, right? That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a reel is how our hair is styled. You talk about the important role hairstylist play in our community, the pressure to always look put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually

free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to therapy for black girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, we are disproving the Big Bang Theory here today, right? Daniel, we're aiming big here. We're blowing it all up, yep. We're going for the biggest bang possible. We are having a crazy sale. Come by a gal. It's a thousand percent off. What would you do with the galaxy?

I don't know. But real estate is the best investment. That's what everybody's telling me. All right. Well, so we have a theory of the Big Bang, or at least a general model of what happened at the beginning of the universe, at least starting from a certain point in time.

But now there's some data from the James Webb Telescope, which some people are maybe interpreting as disproving the Big Bang. What's going on here? Exactly. And so one of the key predictions of the big. Big Bang theory. When we start, as we say, from T-Equil zero, we model the universe getting less and less hot and more and more spread out. One of the key predictions is exactly how the universe

came to look the way that it does, which means that things cooled and gas formed and stars formed and galaxies formed. And we have a model for how we think that happens. There's this dark ages before there are any stars and then the stars collapse and start to burn. And they come together gradually to form galaxies. We have the sort of like bottom-up theory of formation of galaxies. So galaxies should start out very small, very dim, sort of like mini galaxies merging together to make the big galaxies that we see today. And this is exactly what James Webb can do. James Webb can look into the very, very early part of the universe and watch those galaxies form and check our understanding of how those galaxies came together. Right, because the James Webb Space Telescope

its specialty is looking in the infrared and also looking really far away. And both of the of those things let you kind of see backwards in time, right? Like the further out you see in the universe, the older the things are because it just took that much longer to get to you. So the light we're getting from them now is really old or was made a long time ago. Yes, both of those things. You want to see things that happen in the very beginning of the universe. You have to find old light, light that's been coming to you since that time.

And those photons scream down into the universe and have now just arrived at our instruments. And the James Webb Space Telescope, as you say, can see the infrared. red, which means it sees the lowest energy photons, photons that are well below what we can see. It's sort of a cool science fact. We look at these James Webb telescope pictures. That's not what you would see if your head was out there in space, pointing in the same direction. In fact, if all you could see with the photons that hit the James Webb telescope, you would see blackness.

You would see nothing, right? The images that you see are actually false color. They're shifted. The wavelengths are not the ones that the James Webb saw. James Webb saw them lower and the sort of moved up. up into the visual frequencies so that you can see them. Right. And so looking at this light lets you see things that were really old.

Maybe even like towards the beginning of the universe. What's like what's the oldest thing that the James Webb telescope can see? Well, it's really exciting actually. In the first few days, people started looking at these pictures and spotting things that are old and then older and then even older and then oldest. It was amazing. Like every day their record was broken. They just kept knocking down the barrier seeing things that were in the very early universe,

As far as I can tell, the record right now is seeing things that formed 180 million years after the Big Bang. So, you know, it took about 400,000 years for the universe to cool to the point where we had neutral hydrogen. And then it took a long time for things to coalesce, to form stars, and to form galaxies. You know, we're talking hundreds of millions of years. But we didn't really know. We never seen that far back in time. But now the James Webb Telescope can see those. You know, specifically one of the reasons we can see further back in.

time with James Webb than we can with Hubble is not just because it's bigger, not just because we can see dimmer things because it can gather more light with its larger mirrors, but also specifically because it sees these low energy photons. As they've been flying through space for billions of years, their wavelength has been stretched by the expansion of the universe. So things that started out in the visual spectrum when they left their galaxies billions of years ago are now in the infrared and we need this special technology to see them. You couldn't see these galaxies with the Hubble. Now when you say that we see things that happen 180 million years after the Big Bang, do you mean like actual things like we can see stars at that time? Are there stars at that

time? Or are we seeing things like the background microwave radiation? We are seeing early galaxies. So we can't resolve individual stars. These things are very far, very faint. James Webb itself can even just barely pick out that they exist. We see these smudges that we think are galaxies, meaning, you know, many, many stars. So what we're seeing are real objects. We can't resolve, you know, like stars with planets around them, but we can tell that there are galaxies out there in the very early universe.

And that's exactly what we're trying to understand. How quickly did these galaxies form? How big were they? How bright were they? And does that agree with our model for how the universe evolved from a very hot, dense state to the cold, glittery, beautiful cosmos that we have today?

Wait, you were saying there were actually galaxies already, 180 million years after the Big Bang, that seems like really soon. That seems like really soon. I mean, it's 180 million years, but if you're talking about a universe that's 14 billion years old, it's like having purity when you're one year old. Yeah, it didn't take that long for galaxies to form. And galaxies are actually really, really old. Like the Earth is only 4.5 billion years old.

Our solar system didn't exist for the first 9 billion years of the universe. But the Milky Way is much older. we think it's at least 13 billion years old. And so the Milky Way has been around for almost the entire time of the universe, even though our solar system formed more recently. And so this is one of the biggest questions that James Webb can probe is exactly how early did galaxies form. Do we understand how they formed and how they emerged and how they grew to be the glittering monsters that they are today? Right. And so the space telescope can see little smudges that we think are that old that happened,

and the shine 180 million years after the Big Bang. But then how do we know that little smudge is that old? Like, would you see as much? How do we know it came from those early galaxies? So what we can do is we can measure how far away these smudges are. We can measure the distance from here to there. And that tells us how long the light has been going. And we measure the distance to these galaxies

by seeing how much the light has been red shifted. We talked about this in the podcast recently. We measure the distance to these far away objects by seeing how the light from them has been shifted in frequency by their velocity. Because things that are further away from us are moving away faster. So the further something is away from us, the faster it's moving away from us, and the more its light is shifted in frequency. So if you can measure the red shift of an object,

you can tell how fast it's moving away from us, and therefore you can tell how far away it is, and therefore you can tell how old it is. Right, because I guess you assume that when these early galaxies, when they emitted all this light that it was like regular light, like the kind that R-star emits, right, that's at a certain frequency. And so if you see it shifted in frequency, that means that something's going on. And what's going on in here is that the universe is expanding, right,

which is stretching and moving those frequencies. Exactly. We answered this question on the pot recently. How can you tell if light is redshifted? And you can't by looking at an individual photon. You can't say this photon used to have one frequency and now it has another and I can tell. So it just arrive with a certain frequency. look at the distribution of frequencies from a galaxy you can tell that they've been shifted

because galaxies have a characteristic spectrum based on the atoms that are in them because atoms tend to glow at certain frequencies so you look at that fingerprint you say oh this fingerprint looks like it's shifted to the right by 100 nanometers and that's why you can tell how much it's been redshifted from that you can figure out the relative velocity of it and from that you can figure out the distance and therefore the age and so the king right now is something with a red shift of 20 which means that it's 180 million years after the Big Bang. Because I guess the more redshift, the more it's shifted from its original frequency, the older it is because you assume that if it's that redshifted,

it must have been traveling through expanding space for a long time, which then kind of tells you that it's really old. Exactly. So people have been pouring through one of these deep field pictures from James Webb. This is of SMAC's 0723, which is about 5 billion light years away. and James Webb has spotted all sorts of tiny little galaxies in the background of this. So astronomers have been pouring through this picture, looking at these things, trying to figure out what is the redshift and finding older and older ones every day.

It's been very exciting. Yeah, let's get into what the James Webb Space Telescope actually saw that might be disproving the Big Bang. You're saying that it's seeing some galaxies that are at a certain distance, or is this like super duper far away, like behind what we're actually thinking or trying to see? So it's seeing really, really old galaxies, which is great because we want to understand what's happened in the early universe as these galaxies were forming. The issue is the surprise is that the galaxies we are seeing with James Webb, they're sort of like too big and too bright. We expected the galaxies would form gradually, that you'd have a blob of stars, they would attract another blob of stars, you'd have mini galaxies combining to form larger and larger galaxies, that if you look really far into the past, you would expect to only see many galaxies that wouldn't be very bright. It wouldn't be very big.

But instead, what we're seeing when we look at these galaxies that are really, really far away and really far into the early universe is that they're much bigger and brighter than we expected. I see. So, wait, so first of all, I guess, where are these galaxies? They must be at the edge of the observable universe, right? Because that would be where the oldest stuff is. Or is it closer? No, you're right. They're very far away.

They're at the edge of the observable universe. There's a little bit of trickery there also because when we talk about where they are, we mean where they are now, not. where they were when they emitted these photons. So these photons, they emitted a long, long time ago. They've been moving away from us ever since. So they are now much further away than they were when they sent us this light. Okay, I was confused because I think you mentioned some field that was closer than the edge of the observable universe. Oh, right.

Well, this smacks field is about five billion light years away. That's what James Hope was focused on. But there's lots of other stuff you can see in the background. And so sort of behind that, you can see lots of other more distant galaxies. are close to the edge of the observable universe. I see. So we're like picking apart the things we see in the background of these images. Exactly.

And astronomers are hunting for them and like, oh, look, what is this smudge? Is that a galaxy? Is that the new record holder? Is that the oldest thing we've ever seen in the universe? It's pretty exciting. Right, right. How do you know it's not just as much in your lens? It's a beautiful instrument, man.

Don't insult it. You know, these things look like galaxies, right? They have a spectrum of light that looks familiar, that looks like what we expect to see from galaxies. And so you can fit that spectrum. You can say, well, this looks like a galaxy, but it looks like at a certain distance. You can also measure the magnitude of it, like how much light are we getting? That tells you basically how bright is it, how many stars are in that galaxy.

You can also look at the details of the spectrum and try to guess at the mass of the galaxy because there's some connection between the brightness of the various frequencies and the mass of a galaxy. And so what we're seeing are galaxies that seem to be brighter than what we expected and more massive than we expected. We didn't expect galaxies to form this quickly in the universe. So when we say that James Webb Space Telescope is it blowing up the Big Bang theory, we don't mean it's disproving Einstein or it's talking about the singularity. We mean it's challenging how galaxies formed in the early universe because what we're seeing out there are bigger, brighter galaxies earlier than we expected. I see. So we're looking at the background of these pictures and we're seeing

super duper, like the oldest galaxies we've ever seen, and they're bigger than what we thought they were, they should be at that point in the universe. Is that kind of what you're saying? Yeah, like you go to visit your brother and he's got kids and they're supposed to be one years old, but they're already taller than you. And you're like, well, something's going

on here, right? That would be a big bang, yeah. There's so many jokes I could make there, but I'm not going to because this is a family friendly show. Yeah, let's keep it safe for work here. All right, well, I guess first of all, How do we know how bright these things are and how do we know how massive and that they're bigger than they should be?

Like just from the size of this much or what? We can tell by how bright they are just by counting how many photons arrive per second, right? The more stars that there are there, the more photons we're going to get. So it's just like a crude way of measuring like how many stars are in a galaxy is how bright is it in the sky. That's a way to tell how many stars there are. We can also try to estimate the overall mass of the galaxy by looking at the spectrum and seeing like, oh, how red is it? How green is it?

We have these ideas for how the spectrum of a galaxy looks as it gets more and more massive. Really? How does that change with the size? It changed with the size because, remember, that bluer stars are hotter stars and don't burn as long. So some galaxies have more blue stars and some galaxies have more red stars. And this depends on whether or not they're still making stars and how old the stars are in them. And that depends on the mass of the galaxy. Because remember, making stars is not that. easy. It depends a little bit on having just the right conditions. You need big blobs of cold gas to

form together. So by looking at like the different colors of light that come from a galaxy, we can get a sense for whether it's been recently making stars or not. And from that, we can get a sense for the mass of the galaxy. And if that sounds a little bit tenuous to you, you're right. It's not something we understand super duper well. It's like a trend we've noticed among a bunch of galaxies we've been studying, but it's not something we have like a hard and fast rule for. I think what you're saying is that you can look at younger galaxies, like galaxies that we can see that are closer to us. And you do see this trend of like, okay, if it's this big and this massive and this bright, we should be seeing this in the light spectrum. And so you're saying

that we're seeing this light spectrum from the old, old galaxies. And so we can sort of make guesses about how big and bright it is. Yeah. And we see some weird stuff. Like there's some galaxies out there in the very, very early universe that seem to be already as massive as the Milky Way. Like, how can you get such a huge galaxy so early on in the history of the universe? And so that's really the puzzle is why are we seeing galaxies that are so far away and so big and so bright? Because I guess we had a guess about how galaxies should evolve with the history of the universe. And this is kind of not fitting that history.

Yeah, we have a model. We can simulate the universe from the very beginning. when we think our laws apply and say start out with gas and how clumpy was it and we can predict how clumpy it was because of the distribution of dark matter and quantum fluctuations in it and we can also check those assumptions right this is not just a story we're telling we can see the very very early universe in the cosmic microwave background radiation this light that was emitted just before it became transparent we can see those ripples from the very early universe in the CMB so we're pretty sure we know how the universe sloshed around in the very early moments and how that led

to the formation of structure, vast pools of dark matter that pulled themselves together and then pulled in gas, which then formed stars and galaxies. So we thought we had a pretty good story. And you're right. That story predicts that we should not see really big galaxies very early on in the universe or really bright galaxies really, really far away. So it is a surprise to see these galaxies. Well, the theory didn't say that we shouldn't see them. It's just that they were rare or something, right? It's possible to get super-duper massive galaxies very early on, but not this many. And it should take a lot longer to find them. So we're seeing a lot of these giant old galaxies? Is that what you're saying? Yeah, we've only just started to look and we're already seeing giant old, bright

galaxies. So it's sort of like if you're looking for four-leaf clovers and you expect to find one in a football field and you look down and you find 10 under your feet, then you're thinking, hmm, something about my estimate is wrong, right? This seems very unlikely. Right. Or maybe since they are bigger and brighter, you just see them more easily. Well, we definitely do see them more easily than the dimmer ones, but they shouldn't even be there. We just have the first scoop of data from James Webb. And already in this like little tiny patch of space, we see many, many more of these bright massive galaxies than we expect to see. So either it's a huge fluctuation, or there's something fuzzy about our measurements, or there's something wrong about our understanding of the early

universe. Right, right. And also maybe about its composition, right? Because a lot of this theory or story of what happened has to do with dark matter as well. Yeah, it's all tangled together. The dark matter and the photons and the normal matter all sloshed together in this mush in the very early universe. And we do think that we understand that part fairly well. I mean, we can measure things like sound waves moving through the early universe and the acoustic oscillations that it forms in the structure of galaxies we see today. So that part feels pretty secure. secure. So this really was a big surprise to see something that sort of contradicts it. All right. Well, we seem to have actual data that maybe throws our theories about what happened

after the Big Bang or after the universe sort of grew up and evolved. And so what does it all mean? Is the Big Bang theory right or is it off a little bit? Let's get into that. But first, let's take another quick break. September 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal, glass.

The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back. In Season 2, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious.

Oh, wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy?

That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor. and they're the same age. It's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet.

So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was.

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I'm Dr. Joy Harden-Bradford. And in session 421 of Therapy for Black Girls, I sit down with Dr. Othia and Billy Shobes. to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system, right? In terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief. But I think with social media, there's like a hyper fixation and observation of our hair, right? That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a reel is how

our hair is styled. We talk about the important role hairstylists play in our community, the pressure to always look put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett,

where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to therapy for black girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, we're talking about the new data from the James Webb Space Telescope. Then maybe these old galaxies that are bigger than they should be, which means that maybe our model of the Big Bang and what happened afterwards could be a little bit off or a lot of off, Daniel. Is this a big deal or just like a tweak in the parameters of the model?

It's definitely a big deal. It's a lot of fun for cosmologists. It's exactly what we were hoping to happen. when we look deep into the universe to see something surprising. It's exactly the kind of thing we see every time we do look in a new part of the universe with a new eyeball is something that makes us scratch our heads and go, huh? And so it's very exciting. And there's a lot of different ideas being floated out there for how to explain it. First of all, there's a lot of caution.

You know, like, are we sure about these measurements? I think probably the number one explanation that most cosmologists and astrophysicists are thinking about is how well we know the. brightness and the size of these early galaxies. Because, you know, these are really dim smudges from very, very, very faint things, very, very far away. How confident are we in these measurements of distance and age and size? Right. I wonder also if maybe like early galaxies or back then things just emitted light differently. Is that possible? Well, what we're talking about is emission of light from hydrogen. And hydrogen's pretty basic stuff. We've studied it for a long time. We're pretty sure that hydrogen emitted light the same way a billion years ago and 10 billion years ago as it does today.

Physics of hydrogen and light emission is pretty well understood. So unless like the very laws of physics are changing with time, which would be awesome and cool, we're pretty sure that it emits light the same way. But there's an issue there, which is James Webb by itself, just looking at these distant galaxies once, is not great at measuring these red shifts. It's a bit of a quick and dirty measurement. And so there could be a lot of uncertainty there. What do you mean, quick and dirty? How does it measure these spectrum of light? So the way you'd like to do with the gold standard is to look at this galaxy in a lot of different wavelengths, right?

All the way from the UV down to the visible, down to the infrared, down to the radio. So you could see as many atomic lines as possible. That would give you like a really precise measurement. You see like 50 fingers from atoms and you could see them all slid over the same amount. That would give you a lot of confidence. We haven't done that yet with these galaxies because we've only just discovered them. We didn't even know they were there. And so the next step is like point other telescopes at them that can see them in other frequencies,

optical telescopes on the ground, UV telescopes in space to get the full spectrum of these galaxies. What we have right now is a really partial spectrum just from the James Webb, which can only see in the infrared. And so it's got like the very edge of the spectrum from which we can get an estimate, but there's a lot of uncertainty there. It can really just sort of only see the very tail end of the spectrum. You mean like the measurement of these frequencies is kind of fuzzy. It's in itself.

Yeah. Also because these things are faint, right? So we don't have great data. If you look at this data, it's not like really crisp and beautiful. You can see the statistical fluctuations because it's a limited number of photons that have made it this far. So there's just an inherent uncertainty in these redshift measurements. I see.

So maybe our estimate of how old they are. is wrong or maybe our estimate of how big they are or how bright they are is wrong. So both. Right now we're just talking about how old they are. So specifically these redshift measurements is sort of a quick and dirty approach. What they're doing right now is just sort of looking for the edge of the spectrum. A neutral hydrogen atoms floating in space will absorb and emit radiation but sort of like a maximum radiation that they will absorb and emit. And that corresponds to like an electron from the lowest level absorbing enough energy to be totally ionized to fly out into space. So it's sort of like a maximum frequency there for hydrogen. And what they're

doing is they're looking at these galaxies and different frequencies and they're looking for that disappearance. They're looking for like the edge of the spectrum where it sort of falls off. So there's really just like one feature that they're looking at. If you really want a precise measurement, you should have the whole spectrum and see lots of different features. So it's totally reasonable and it's exactly what they should be doing with the first data, but there's also a lot of uncertainty in these numbers. So this one galaxy that we think is that redshift of 20, 180 million years after the Big Bang,

it could be different. It could be that that's actually 500 million years after the Big Bang. And so it might be that it's exactly where we think it should be. It's just that we mismeasured the age. I see. We don't have like great resolution to measure these red chips is what you're saying. We just have a first glimpse from James Webb. And what we need to do is either like focus James Webb on it for a while.

So we get more data. We get crisper resolution. or look at it with other telescopes also in other frequencies so we can get a bigger handle on it, a better fit for how much of this redshift there really is. Yeah, nobody likes it when photos make you look older than you really are. That's always a bummer. It could be that these galaxies actually are maybe younger

than what we initially think, and so that everything is fine. But then the other possibilities and maybe our models are a little bit off. There's also this question of the mass of the galaxies, right? We talked about how we look at these spectra and we try to guess the mass based on how the different colors of light come in. And, you know, there's a lot of uncertainty there also. We're talking about comparing our galaxies to very early galaxies. There's just sort of a lot of assumptions that go in and the relationship between the spectrum of the mass that are not really very well understood.

You know, for example, maybe one of these galaxies has a black hole the center of it and it has an active galactic nuclei like a quasar emitting a lot of light. So we think we're counting the brightness of the galaxy and using that to figure out with the mass. But actually, there's a huge quasar in the middle that's changing our estimation of the brightness and the whole spectrum and throwing the whole thing off. So there's also a lot of uncertainty in the mass measurements. So I'd say overall people are excited about this data and it's interesting, but I'd say it's still too fuzzy to draw any strong conclusions that it's really in contradiction with our models of the early universe. Yeah, nobody likes it when photos make you look more massive either. But it's possible, right? It could be that this is the first glimpse of something which really does pull the rug out of our idea for how structure formed in the early universe.

And actually, it wouldn't even be the first hint. We had another infrared telescope, the Spitzer. And the Spitzer also looked at really old galaxies. It wasn't as big and as fancy. It couldn't see as much light and it wasn't as powerful as James Webb. But it also saw some galaxies which seemed too massive. So this sort of aligns with what people were all. already seeing with another telescope.

So James Swap is not the first one to sort of see this maybe old galaxies that are too big to be, to fit our model. But what does it mean that maybe our models are wrong? Is it just that we're missing a piece of it or maybe, I mean, it's not going to throw the whole Big Bang theory out into the trash bin, right? It's probably just going to maybe tweak our models of what happened or after the Big Bang or, you know, maybe what elements are there to determine how things evolve. Yeah, we're not throwing the Big Bang away.

is the Big Bang is very successful predicting so many details, you know, the abundances of helium and hydrogen in the universe and the cosmic web and the microwave background radiation. All of that are elements of the Big Bang, which are very, very solid. What we're talking about is tweaking something about how quickly structure formed, right? How quickly do you get clumps of stuff pulling it together forming galaxies? If these data are right and more precise measurements bear them out, then it just means that there's something missing in that early structure formation. And you know, there are other hints that that might be true. We've talked about early dark energy, these models that the universe might have another component that accelerated its

expansion and its structure formation early on in the universe that changes our idea of like how old the whole universe is. It could give like higher dark matter density in the early universe, which pulled things together faster than we expected and that we give galaxies forming more rapidly than we expect it. So it's sort of in that direction. It would be a tweak, on the parameters, maybe adding one more component, but we're definitely not throwing the whole thing in the trash. Right, because I think we've talked about this before how things like dark energy and dark matter, they're not necessarily constant throughout the history of the universe, right?

Like there's the idea that maybe dark energy was faster or slower at some points earlier in our history. Yeah, there's this idea of early dark energy, which is confusing because people don't think it's actually dark energy. They think it's something else dark energy like, which came around in the very early universe and sort of changed how things expanded and were shaped and then fizzled out after a few hundred million years and so we don't see it anymore so it might just be that there's something else going on in the early universe that we don't understand that affects how the whole thing evolved and we

have clues about this because we look at the expansion of the universe as we see it today from like type 1a supernova and we see it expanding at a certain rate and then we look at the expansion of the universe very early on from the cosmic microwave background radiation and they don't really add up right they tell two different stories about the expansion of the universe. And so this discovery from James Webb might be pointing in that same direction that the very early universe is a little bit different from what we expected, not radically different. It's not like it was all purple dinosaurs swimming through space back then.

We're not going to start from scratch, but it might be that the details are wrong and need a little bit of tweaking. But that does sound pretty fun, purple dinosaurs swimming around. Wouldn't you want to switch to that field, Daniel? I mean, if you're going to be wrong 100% of the time, you might as well be wrong 100% of time with a wild and fun idea. Yeah, no, I'm not anti-purple dinosaur, absolutely.

I'm pro-purple dinosaur if it fits the data, right? But currently, we have no evidence for purple space dinosaurs. Right. Well, I think generally what you're saying is that, you know, we're looking at basically baby pictures of the universe, of galaxies in the universe, and they look a little chunkier and a little bigger than they should be. So it could be that our pictures are wrong,

or it could be that maybe you don't know what happened in between, Like maybe these babies went on a diet and started working out. And so they lost a lot of weight in between. And that's how they are the size they are now. I'm so glad this is not a parenting podcast because, boy, so many red flags there. But yes, as an analogy, I think that describes it perfectly. These babies were really fat when they were born and now they've gotten thinner. Right.

Due to maybe changing dark energy or something like that. Or some new baby diet fat that was popular 14 billion years ago. Exactly. Only eating smoothies made out of. purple space dinosaurs, for example. Oh, my God. Wait, now you're having the babies eat the dinosaurs? Boy, that is wrong in other levels.

Better than the other direction, right? Would you rather have the dinosaurs eat the babies? I mean, I don't think we want to go there. It's 100% wrong either way. Okay. So then it's very scientific. But the lesson is that we're just learning about the early universe and we have this fantastic new tool,

which is giving us incredible power to see those early moments, to watch these galaxies form and to compare them to the, ideas we've long had about how the universe forms and maybe to update them and correct them. And this is just the very first blush of data from the telescope. So it tells you that we're heralding in a completely new era of astronomy and cosmology with this new incredible eyeball. Yeah, these incredible chubby baby pictures. I think the lesson is that, you know, we have these theories about the universe, but they kind

have to fit the data, right? They have to fit what we see today. and they also had to fit what we see in the past through these powerful telescopes. Exactly. And contrary to what people read in that article, there's still a huge amount of data supporting our idea roughly for the early universe

and how the structure of the universe we see today was created through those processes. We're not tossing that all out, but we might need to update it. Right. It's not a panic. It's more like a whoops. It's more like a, ooh, this is exciting. Well, not for the people who published the original

papers. They're just going to get more citations. You get citations if you're right or if you're wrong. That seems like a 100% win right there. Well, all of humanity is winning because we're all just learning more about the universe. Yeah. Or at least learning that we're least less, least wrong maybe. Little by little. We're least year and least year wrong every year. Well, stay tuned as we get more resolution on these pictures from the James Webb Telescope and more confirmation about its red-shifting and the exact measurement of these really old galaxies. I guess we'll learn more soon. And I look forward to the next wave of space telescope that I hope will launch in the 2030s,

an even larger, more powerful set of eyeballs to teach us the secrets of the universe. We hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed.

There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged. Terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell, and the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like,

gotcha. This technology is already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier.

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