Did the James Webb Space Telescope disprove the Big Bang Theory?

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. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
And Daniel, what are the chances that physics is wrong?
I would guess something about What do you mean everything
you've been telling us is wrong? There's percent chance that
we don't have everything right? So what are we even
doing here? What do we pay you for them? Well?
You know our idea right now is sure to be wrong,

(00:29):
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 wrong? It
means the long arc of science bends towards the truth
but might never actually get there. It doesn't sound like
a band at all. That's where like the straight line

(00:50):
towards wrongness or least wrongness. No, it's a random walk
through late nights and lots of frustration in coffee. Right. Well,
have you ever thought of 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. It's never
too late to change careers. Maybe you can be in

(01:11):
one that's a little less least wrong. There's some joy
in being wrong? Are you right about that? Probably? Wrong?

(01:33):
I am more handmade cartoonist and the co author of
frequently asked 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, how do
you know you're 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 not knowing
what's going on about the universe. Well, now, the book

(01:56):
was called we Have No Idea, None, We are wrong.
I think you're wrong about the title of the bontanil.
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.

(02:17):
And the process of science is iterative. Right. We start
with one idea, it works for a while, and 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 over it throw
the mechanistic universe for quantum mechanics. That's kind of a
philosophical question, right, if an idea is is right a

(02:38):
little bit of the time or for a while was
it wrong in retrospect? It's really an interesting question in philosophy.
What is something you 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

(02:58):
curves and instead describes gravity in terms of this like
fictitious force that doesn't really exist, Right, but it's right,
and that it works for like n 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

(03:20):
the 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 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?

(03:42):
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 My Heart Radio in which
we try to tease apart the mess that is the universe,

(04:04):
this glorious, beautiful, incredibly wonderful mess that we find ourselves
in and that we puzzle over, and then 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

(04:26):
are 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 and trying to understand it. Hey, if
you're gonna go wrong, go big, that's right, go a
thousand percent wrong, or maybe infinity wrong. Yeah, and don't

(04:48):
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 um,
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

(05:08):
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. New people think, oh, scientists

(05:31):
got it. These theories about the origin of the universe
and how big it is, and whether it's flat or
curve and things like that. But actually these things are
still being debated. In 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

(05:53):
how's 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 of 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

(06:14):
of our cosmos, we discover things that shock us as
the process, 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 maybe wrong.
And so, Daniel, you got an avalanche of comments from
listeners asking us to talk about this. That's right. There

(06:36):
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 web
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

(06:56):
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 for waiting for you 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

(07:18):
about something as fundamental as the beginning of the universe.
And so today on the podcast, we'll be asking the
question did the James web 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

(07:39):
up a big bang? Right? Can you make it bang
year or bigger or bigger bang? Hear. Yeah, you would
think that it's already banged, But I guess you can
blow up the explosion too. You think that the origin
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.

(08:00):
I guess you could should go both ways. You could
have a smaller bang and the even bigger bang. So
this article that seemed to cause all this stirring social
media and on the Internet as 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

(08:20):
web Space Telescope has seen and why it might cause
doubt on theories that describe the very very early universe.
But the article is not exactly like very strong scientific arguments.
For example, it references a reasoned paper by a cosmologist.
The title of that paper is Panic at the Discs,
which has to do with seeing very very distant galaxies.

(08:42):
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 two thousands email band called Panic at the Disco.
So it's just a case of astronomers making bad jokes,
not actual crisis in the field. Wait, so let me
get this straight. Um. So the article that went viral

(09:04):
is an article about a research paper. It's an article
about some data that came from James web Space telescope,
and it references this research paper as evidence that cosmologists
are panicking 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

(09:26):
an opportunity for a bad pun, and you know, they
took it. And I gotta 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 cost some panic, you know, like primely it did.
It's sort of the trend these days to try to

(09:47):
come up with witty research papers. I wrote an astrophysics
paper ones 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 all goes back to a research paper that
and that use the work panic in the title. But
they didn't really mean to convey panic, but it did

(10:07):
sort of maybe mean to convey something wrong, right, that
something was off. That's right. There is something really interesting
and weird and fascinating about the data from the James
web 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 a normal amount

(10:29):
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.

(10:49):
When we were 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,
business 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 not feeling a lot of zen right now. Yeah.

(11:11):
I don't know how Newton would have felt if he
was in the seminar room when Einstein presented general activity.
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. Everyone 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

(11:32):
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 size you should
have in your head. Everyone's trying to one up each other. Yeah,

(11:54):
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. You can't get
a hundred nerds degree on anything except 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

(12:16):
that the Big Bang theory is not quite right. So
let's start with the basics. What is the Big Bang theory?
This is a good opportunity to 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

(12:37):
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,

(12:58):
and maybe a harness 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,

(13:18):
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 yet it was like sort
of like a dot everywhere all at once. But if
it had a sort of a finite volume, and 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

(13:39):
would still happen 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 the sense we have
is that no place in the universe is special. The
laws of physics are the same everywhere, so there no
reason for the Big Bang to happen here or there
or around the corner. It should happen everywhere at once,

(14:01):
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 more like before the Big Bang, the universe was
just there was just a lot less space, and so

(14:23):
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's finite. We can only see a

(14:43):
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 the universe, we see that this expansion happened. We
can dial it backwards to a much denser, earlier stage.
But we don't think it happened in just one location.
We think it probably happened everywhere. The other important details

(15:05):
to sort through about the Big Bang is exactly what
we mean by time equal zero, Like, when did the
Big Bang happen? 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 equal 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

(15:29):
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 equal 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

(15:51):
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 relative it is applicable at
those stages. Right, But I think you still put TI
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, you know, the

(16:13):
Big Bang theory. We put 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 equal zero is,
is this early, very dense universe, not at 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

(16:34):
Plank temperature, and that's what we say T equal 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 infloton field
that decayed into that state. Huge question mark. Lots of speculation.
But TI equal zero. The actual Big Bang doesn't start
from that singularity. It starts from the hottest, densest state

(16:55):
that our physics can currently describe. Okay, I see what
you're saying. You're saying the Big Bang theory does actually
start at the beginning you just said to equal 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? Are laws
of physics breakdown there? You know? And that's because we

(17:17):
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

(17:40):
true fundamental theory. But we say T equals zero sort
of like the earliest point that we can describe. We
think maybe there was something before that, big question marks
about what that might have been. Well, almost certainly there
were things before then, right the tegual zeros the stuff
that was there 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

(18:03):
was filled with this other kind of field, an insulton field,
which is 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 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

(18:25):
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 equal zero. Right, And I
guess I'd ranged me to my question, which is like,
is there actually just one Big Bang theory or is
it kind of like a general family of ideas or
one idea that's incomplete? But there are many different possibilities

(18:47):
about it, you know what I mean, Like is it
one established theory or is it just kind of like
a general idea, great questions. So before to equal 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 it. We explore them in some episodes.
After T equal zero, there's a pretty solid idea of
describing that expansion and understanding how it shaped the universe
that we see today, and that's really very rigorous. We

(19:10):
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 equal
zero and 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

(19:32):
it really hangs together very nicely. That is until maybe
this latest set of data from the James web Space Telscope,
which some people might argue throws the whole theory into
disarrayan 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

(19:53):
quick break. All right, we are disproving the Big Bang
theory here today, right, Daniel. That's we're aiming big here.
We're blowing it all up. Yep, we're going. We're going

(20:14):
for the biggest bank possible. We are having a crazy
sale come by a galaxy. It's a thousand percent off.
What what would you do with the gals? I don't know,
but real estate is the best investment. That's what everybody's
telling me. All right, well, um, so we have a
theory of the Big Bang, or at least a general
model of what happened at the beginning of the universe,

(20:34):
at least starting from a certain point in time. But
now there's some data from the James Web 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 Bang theory, when we start,
as we say, from t qual zero, we model the
universe getting less and less hot and more and more
spread out. One of the key predictions is exactly how

(20:56):
the universe came to look the way that it does,
which means that things cool old 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 this sort of like bottom up
theory of formation of galaxies. So galaxies should start out

(21:19):
very small, very dim, sort of like many 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

(21:40):
James Webb Space Telescope is it's a specialty is looking
in the infrared and also looking really far away and
both of those things that you kind of see backwards
in time, right, Like, the further out do you see
in the universe, the older the things are, because um,
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

(22:02):
of those things. You want to see things that happened
at 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 screamed down into the universe
and have now just arrived at our instruments. And the
James Web Space Telescope, as you say, can see the infrared,
which means it sees the lowest energy photons, photons that
are well below what we can see. It's sort of

(22:24):
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 Web saw. James Webb saw

(22:45):
them lower and the sort of moved up into the
visual frequencies so that you can see them. Right. And
so looking at this light, let's 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 Webbs that lescope 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,

(23:07):
and then even older and then oldiest. 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 a hundred
and eighty million years after the Big Bang, So you know,
it took about four hundred thousand years for the universe
to cool to the point where we had neutral hydrogen,

(23:29):
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've never seen that far back in time. But now
that 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

(23:52):
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

(24:13):
this special technology to see them. You couldn't see these
galaxies with the hubble. Now when you say that we
see things that have been a hundred and eighty million
years after the Big Bang, do you mean like actual
things like we can see stars at that time where
their 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,

(24:36):
very faint. James Webb itself can even just barely pick
out that they exist. We see these smudges that we
think our galaxies, meaning you know, many many stars. So
what we're seeing our 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

(24:58):
did these galaxies form, how big we're today, 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, glitterally beautiful cosmos that we have today.
What you're saying, they were actually galaxies already a hundred
and eighty million years after the Big Bang. That seems
like really soon. It seems like really soon. I mean

(25:19):
it's eight million years, but you know, if you're talking
about the universe, it's fourteen billion years old. It's it's
like having purity in when y're one year 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 four and a half billion years old. Our Solar
system didn't exist for the first nine billion years of
the universe, but the Milky Way is much older. We

(25:42):
think it's at least thirteen billion years old, and so
the Milky Way has been around for almost the entire
time of the universe, even though our Solar system for
more recently. And so this is one of the biggest
questions that James Webb con probe is exactly how early
did galaxies form? Do we understand how they formed and
how they emerge and how they grew to be the

(26:02):
glittering monsters that they are today? Right? And so the
space telescope can see little smudges that we think are
that old that happened that the chind a hundred and
eighty million years after the Big Bang. But then how
do we know that little s mudge is that old?
Like we just see as much, how do we know
it's it's came from those early galaxies. So what we
can do is we can measure how far away these

(26:24):
smudges are, and 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. Measure the
distance to these far away objects by seeing how the
light from them has been shifted in frequency by their velocity.

(26:45):
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
it's 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

(27:06):
you assume that when these early galaxies, when they emitted
all this light, that it was light like regular light
like the kind of our 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 thretching and moving those frequencies exactly. We answered

(27:27):
this question on the pot recently. How can you tell
if light is red shifted? 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, let's just arrive with a certain frequency.
But if you 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.

(27:50):
So you look at that fingerprint, you say, oh, this
fingerprint looks like it's shifted to the right by a
hundred animeters, And that's how you can tell how much
it's been red shifted. From that, you can figure out
the relative pity of it, and from that you can
figure out the distance and therefore the age. And so
the king right now is something with the red shift
of twenty which means that it's a hundred and eighty
million years after the Big Bang, because I guess the

(28:13):
more red shift, the more it's shifted from its original frequency,
the older it is, because you assume that if it's
that red shifted, it must have been traveling through expanding
space for a long time, which then can it tells
you that it's it's really old exactly. So people have
been pouring through one of these deep field pictures from
James Webb. This is of Smacks O seven to three,

(28:35):
which is about five billion light years away, and James
Webb has spotted all sorts of tiny little galaxies in
the background of this. So astronomer has been pouring through
this picture looking at these things trying to figure out
what is the red shift 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

(28:57):
seeing some galaxies that are at a certain distance or
is this like 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

(29:18):
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 tract another blob of stars, you'd
have many 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 and that wouldn't be very big. But instead,

(29:39):
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 that they must be
at the edge of the observable universe, right, because that's
that would be where the oldest stuff is. Or is
it closer? Now? You're right there, very far away there
at the edge of the the rubble universe. There's a

(30:01):
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 confuised because I think

(30:21):
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
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
that are close to the edge of the observable universe.
I see. So we're like picking apart the things we

(30:42):
see in the background of these images exactly, and astronomers
are hunting for them, and like, oh, look, what is
this smudge is at a galaxy? Is that the new
record holders that the oldest thing we've ever seen in
the universe. That's pretty exciting, right, right? How do you
know it's not just as much in the in your lenge.
It's a beautiful instrument, man and insulted. Now, these things
look like galaxies, right, They have a spectrum of light

(31:04):
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

(31:26):
connection between the brightness of the various frequencies and the
mass of a galaxy. And so what we're seeing our
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 web Space telescope, is it blowing up
the Big Bang theory? We don't mean it's disproving Einstein

(31:46):
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 acron 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

(32:07):
they were they should be at that point in the universe.
Is that going to 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.
There's so many jokes I could make there, but I'm
not going to because this is a family friendly show. Yeah,

(32:28):
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 mudge or or what
we can tell about how bright they are just by
counting how many photons arrived 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,

(32:50):
like how many stars are in the galaxy? Is how
right is it in the sky. That's the 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? Are these ideas for how the
spectrum of a galaxy looks as it gets more and
more massive. How does that change with the size? The

(33:11):
change with the size because remember that bluer stars are
hotter stars and don't burn as long, and 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

(33:33):
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.

(33:55):
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 they 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 in the light specdroom.
And so you're saying that we're seeing this light spectrum

(34:17):
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 seemed
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

(34:38):
really the puzzle is why are we seeing galaxies that
are so far away and so big and so bright. See,
because I guess we had a guess about how galaxies
should evolved with the history of the universe, and this
is kind of um 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,

(34:58):
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 admitted just before it became transparent. We

(35:18):
can see those ripples from the very early universe in
the CMB. So we're pretty sure we know how the
universe slashed 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 forms stars and galaxies. So we thought we
had a pretty good story, and you're right, that story

(35:39):
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 you should take a longer

(36:00):
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 ten under your feet, and you're thinking, something about
my estimate is wrong, right, this seems very unlikely, right,

(36:22):
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,

(36:44):
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 are our story of
what happened has to do with dark matter as well. Yeah,
it's all tingled together, the dark matter and the photons
and the normal matter slashed together in this motion the
very early universe. And we do think that we understand

(37:05):
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. So
this one really was a big surprise to see something
that sort of contradicts it all right, Well, we seem
to have actual data that maybe throw us our theories

(37:27):
about what happened after the Big Bank or after the
universe sort of grew up in 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. All right, we're

(37:53):
talking about the new data from James web Space telescope.
Then maybe um sees old Gala sees 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 off. Daniel, is
this a big deal or just like a tweak in
the parameters of the model. It's definitely a big deal.

(38:14):
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. For the 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.

(38:35):
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 faint things, very very

(38:56):
far away. How confident are we in these measurements of
dis and age and size? Right? I wonder also of 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 is 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

(39:18):
ago and ten 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

(39:39):
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 rate

(40:00):
you so you could see as many atomic lines as possible.
That would give you like a really precise measurement. You
see like fifty fingers from atoms, and you can 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

(40:20):
see them in other frequencies, optical telescopes on the ground,
u V telescopes in space to get the full spectrum
of these galaxies. We have right now is a really
partial spectrum just from the James Webb, which you 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

(40:40):
can really just sort of only see the very tail
end of the spectrum. You mean, like the measurement of
these freaking sees is kind of fuzzy. It's in itself. Yeah.
Also because these things are faint, right, so we don't
have great data. You look at this data, it's not
like really crisp and beautiful. You can see the statistical
fluctuations because a limit it a number of photons that

(41:01):
have made it this far. So there's just an inherent
uncertainty in these red shift measurements. Nice, 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 red
shift measurements. That's sort of a quick and dirty approach.
What they're doing right now is just sort of looking

(41:22):
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

(41:44):
looking at these galaxies and different frequencies and they're looking
for that disappearance of looking for like the edge of
the spectrum where it sort of falls off. So it's
really just like one feature that they're looking at. If
you really want to 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

(42:05):
uncertainty in these numbers. So it's one galaxy that we
think of that red shift to twenty eight million years
after the Big Bang, it could be different. It could
be that that's actually five hundred million years after the
Big Bang, So it might be that it's exactly where
we think it should be. It's just that we mismeasured
at the age. I see. We don't have great resolution
to measure these red ships, is what you're saying. We

(42:26):
just have a first glimpse from James Webb, and what
we need to do is either like focus James web
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 the red shift there really is. Yeah, nobody likes
it when photos make you look older than you really are.

(42:49):
That's always a bummer. It could be that these galaxies
actually are maybe younger than what we initially think and
so and that everything is fine, but then the other
possibilities and maybe are model 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

(43:10):
a lot of uncertainty there. Also, we're talking about comparing
our galaxies to very early galaxies, and 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 quaisar
emitting a lot of light, so we think we're counting

(43:33):
the brightness of the galaxy and using that to figure
out what 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

(43:56):
with our models of the early universe. Yeah, nobody likes
it when photo 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

(44:18):
also looked at really old galaxies. It wasn't as big
in this 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 already seeing with another
telescope m So James Webb 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

(44:40):
does it mean that it that are 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 evolved. Yeah,
not throwing the Big Bang away, because the Big Bang

(45:02):
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 that are
elements of the Big Bang which are very very solid.
We're talking about is tweaking something about how quickly structure
formed and how quickly do you get clumps of stuff
pulling it together forming galaxies. If these data are right

(45:26):
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

(45:46):
universe is. It could give like higher dark matter density
in the early universe, which pulled things together faster than
we expected, and then we give galaxies forming more rapidly
than we expected. So it's sort of in that direct
it 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

(46:07):
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, this is 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

(46:28):
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 one A supernova, we see it expanding at

(46:50):
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 bansion 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

(47:12):
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 when when you want
to switch to that field, Danniel, I mean you're gonna
be wrong of the time. You might as well be
wrong of time with a wild and fun idea. Yeah, no,

(47:32):
I'm not anti purple dinosaur. Absolutely a 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 they basically baby pictures of the universe of galaxies
in the universe, and they look a little trunkier and
a little bigger than they should be. So it could
be that our pictures are wrong, or it could be

(47:54):
that maybe you don't know what happened in between, Like
maybe these babies went on a diet and started working
out on 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 boys 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

(48:18):
or something like that, or some new baby diet fat
that was popular fourteen billion years ago, exactly, only eating
smoothies made out of purple space dinosaurs for example. Oh
my god, now now you're having the babies eat the dinosaurs. Boy,
that 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

(48:39):
go there. It's 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.

(49:02):
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 um chob baby pictures.
I think the lesson is that, you know, we have
these theories about the universe, but they kind of have
to fit the data, right, They had to fit what

(49:22):
we see today, and they also have 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 are the structure of
the universe we see today was created through those processes.
We're not tossing that all out, but we might need

(49:43):
to update it. Right, It's not a panic. It's more
like a whoop. It's more like, oh, this is exciting. Well,
not for the people who polished the original papers. They're
just gonna get more citations. You get citations if you're
right or if you're wrong. That seems like a right there. Well,
all of humanity is winning because we're all just learning

(50:05):
more about the universe. Yeah, or at least learning that
we're least less least wrong. Maybe little by little we're
least year at 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.

(50:27):
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 twenty thirties, and 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 night. Thanks for listening, and remember that

(50:53):
Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of
I Heart Radio. For more podcast from My heart Radio,
visit the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. H