Transcript
A (0:01)
Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out.
B (0:03)
The Joe Rogan Experience.
A (0:06)
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
B (0:12)
We're up. What's up, man? How are you? Pleasure to meet you, sir.
A (0:15)
Pleasure to be here. Thanks, Jay.
B (0:16)
I really enjoy your content online. It's been really fascinating. So I've been doing a deep dive into a lot of your videos over the last few days and enjoying the hell out of it and particularly enjoying. I wanted to talk to you about so many different things, but one of the most pressing things, one of the reasons why I wanted to bring you in, because you are very knowledgeable in all things space, is the James Webb telescope and all the different stuff that they've been finding, particularly about these galaxies that were formed very shortly after. Not shortly, you know, not within our lifetime. Shortly.
A (0:49)
Right.
B (0:49)
Cosmologically shortly after the Big Bang, that it seems like we have to figure out why these things are forming. Is the universe older? There's all this different kind of speculation. Maybe the Big bang is not 13 point whatever billion years old, but maybe 22, 24. Like, what, what is your take on all this?
A (1:11)
Yeah, the James Webb Space Telescope is such an incredible instrument. The data has just blown us away. You know, when you build this thing and you look at it unfolding in space, you think there's so many ways it could go wrong. That we all were just like, you know, this thing was 215 moving parts or something had to unfold. So, you know, just the fact in space. Yeah, the fact it just all worked was just remarkable. Right. And then we've got those first images. They just kind of blew us away as well because we had sort of these engineering expectations of what it would do, but the data was just even better than that. So when it, you know, of course the first thing you want to do is point it to the most distant part of the universe and see what, what's out there in those darkest patches. And so when it did that, yeah, it started finding a couple of things, started finding quasars, which are kind of the. The center of these very active galaxies. These are supermassive black holes that have loads of crap falling in and they're spewing out all this energy. They're kind of feeding supermassive black holes. And so we started detecting those way earlier than we thought the universe should be able to build them. Because to make a supermassive black hole, meaning things like a 100 million solar masses. Imagine that 100 million suns have not only been born, but died, gone through Their entire life cycle died, collapsed into a black hole. And then those black holes have presumably somehow merged together into this super behemoth of this 100 million solar mass thing. So we're finding those just 300 million years after the Big Bang. And that was like, hold on, that doesn't make any sense. How can this be? And similarly with the galaxies we were seeing these images, these galaxies, and you can date roughly how old they should be based off the redshift. So the universe is expanding. So therefore, if something is very far away from us and the universe is expanding, its light gets stretched more and more and more as it journeys over space. And so we can use that red shift to kind of date how old these things are. When we use those dates, we look at these images again, they seem to suspiciously too, too old. You know, you really shouldn't be able to form these things that early on in the universe. And so that kind of puzzled us, I think, for the galaxy thing was a bit of a resolution there. One of the resolutions is that we probably miscalculated how, how easy it is to form these galaxies in the first place. So we had these models for galaxy formation, we had these models for how stars should form, how quickly they should live. But it was all essentially calibrated on what we see around us, like right here in this part of the universe, in the. And then we kind of realize that those same models probably need to be tweaked if you're going to apply them to the early universe, where the density is so much higher, the gas temperature is much hotter, everything's just, you know, completely different, the early universe. So when you kind of make those corrections, it actually looks like maybe it's actually possible to make those galaxies earlier than we thought. So I think the galaxy problem is a bit easier to explain. I think the quasar problem to me is more interesting. How do you get those supermassive black holes so early? There's a certain kind of maximum rate you can feed these things called the Eddington limit. And that's sort of. You throw mass into a black hole and so much energy is going in, some of it spews back out. And energy which spews back out stops other stuff coming in, right? So there's a maximum limit. You can't build a black hole faster in principle than this Eddington limit. And yet when you do the calculation, these black holes must have been fed what we call super Eddington. So faster than Eddington. So something's wrong with our models, right? Either we've got the universe age wrong, which I think is possible, but I would say that's probably a much less likely solution. Or we've got the astrophysics wrong.