Here’s another mainstream media science *communicator* keeping hope alive …
https://www.quantamagazine.org/standard ... -20230120/
Standard Model of Cosmology Survives a Telescope’s Surprising Finds
Reports that the James Webb Space Telescope killed the reigning cosmological model turn out to have been exaggerated.
By Rebecca Boyle
… snip …
The earliest of those confirmed galaxies shed its light 330 million years after the Big Bang, making it the new record-holder for the earliest known structure in the universe.
Sorry, Rebecca, but the lastest JWST results (
https://thunderbolts.info/wp/forum3/phpBB3 ... ?f=3&t=932) indicate the record holding galaxy is now just 200 million years after the Big Bang. Yes, it hasn’t been confirmed yet, but like the others I bet it will. Then what? Because the galaxy is already well developed suggesting, like one of the authors said, that “This tells us that we don't yet know when the earliest galaxy structures formed. We’re not yet seeing the very first galaxies with disks.” How early do galaxies have to form before you admit there’s a serious problem?
Astronomers began asking whether the profusion of early big things defies the current understanding of the cosmos. Some researchers and media outlets claimed that the telescope’s observations were breaking the standard model of cosmology — a well-tested set of equations called the lambda cold dark matter, or ΛCDM, model — thrillingly pointing to new cosmic ingredients or governing laws. It has since become clear, however, that the ΛCDM model is resilient. Instead of forcing researchers to rewrite the rules of cosmology, the JWST findings have astronomers rethinking how galaxies are made, especially in the cosmic beginning. The telescope has not yet broken cosmology, but that doesn’t mean the case of the too-early galaxies will turn out to be anything but epochal.
Notice how Rebecca doesn’t provide any detail about why that’s now “clear”? Instead she goes on to regurgitate the origin story the gnomers love so much … that “most of the material that flew apart after the Big Bang is made of something we can’t see, called dark matter.” What a shame they can’t find it! But somehow, dark matter (and dark energy) will be the glue that keeps ΛCDM alive.
I love this ridiculous claim …
One problem is that ΛCDM’s predictions aren’t always clear-cut. While dark matter and dark energy are simple, visible matter has complex interactions and behaviors, and nobody knows exactly what went down in the first years after the Big Bang; those frenetic early times must be approximated in computer simulations.
DM and DE are “simple”? LOL! Yes, visible matter does have complex interactions and behaviors, PRIMARILY because 99.99% of it (the plasma) is affected by electromagnetism and electric currents … something which the mainstream continues to generally ignore. Indeed, your article doesn't mention electromagnetism or electric current at all. And only mentions plasma as being around in the first million years or so. Q.E.D.
Brant Robertson, a JADES astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, says the findings show that the early universe changed rapidly in its first billion years, with galaxies evolving 10 times quicker than they do today.
Well that's rather unexpected, isn't it? And how to explain that? MORE GNOMES?
One key assumption is that stars always form within a certain statistical range of masses, called the initial mass function (IMF). This IMF parameter is crucial for gleaning a galaxy’s mass from measurements of its brightness, because hot, blue, heavy stars produce more light, while the majority of a galaxy’s mass is typically locked up in cool, red, small stars.
But it’s possible that the IMF was different in the early universe. If so, JWST’s early galaxies might not be as heavy as their brightness suggests; they might be bright but light. This possibility causes headaches, because changing this basic input to the ΛCDM model could give you almost any answer you want. Lovell says some astronomers consider fiddling with the IMF “the domain of the wicked.”
… snip …
Over the course of the fall, many experts came to suspect that tweaks to the IMF and other factors could be enough to square the very ancient galaxies lighting upon JWST’s instruments with ΛCDM.
At least they admit that what they’re doing is *tweaking* their model. But like it was admitted above, turning all the knobs in the model (tweaking) can give you “almost any answer you want”. Is that science? These people seem like witch doctors … poking sticks at things they don’t understand (and never will as long as they continue to ignore electromagnetic effects on plasma) and calling on *spirits* to explain things.
In that case, she said, “what we learn is: How fast can [dark matter] halos collect the gas?”
Spirits like dark matter. What a shame they can’t prove it exists.
But still they use them ...
Somerville also studies the possibility that black holes interfered with the baby cosmos. Astronomers have noticed a few glowing supermassive black holes at a redshift of 6 or 7, about a billion years after the Big Bang. It is hard to conceive of how, by that time, stars could have formed, died and then collapsed into black holes that ate everything surrounding them and began spewing radiation.
But if there are black holes inside the putative early galaxies, that could explain why the galaxies seem so bright, even if they’re not actually very massive, Somerville said.
And that's called tweaking the model with a gnome. It’s necessary, because like that other black hole *expert*, Allison the Big Bang happened Kirkpatrick, said ... “Right now I find myself lying awake at three in the morning and wondering if everything I’ve done is wrong”?
Next, Rebecca reports on the tweaking of the many computer simulations (basically, computer programs with lots of knobs they don’t really understand). Apparently, an astronomer named Benjamin Keller managed to make the simulations produce early galaxies like they were finding. So ΛCDM is safe.
Then as an aside Rebecca mentions that “the universe currently seems to be expanding faster than ΛCDM predicts for a 13.8-billion-year-old universe”. But she hand waves that away by saying “Cosmologists have plenty of possible explanations. Perhaps, some cosmologists speculate, the density of the dark energy that’s accelerating the expansion of the universe is not constant, as in ΛCDM, but changes over time.” In fact, she suggests that “Changing the expansion history of the universe might not only resolve the Hubble tension but also revise calculations of the age of the universe at a given redshift. JWST might be seeing an early galaxy as it appeared, say, 500 million years after the Big Bang rather than 300 million.” So ΛCDM is safe.
You see folks, it’s pretty obvious. ΛCDM is simply to big to be allowed to fail. Too many jobs and too many comfortable lives depend on it. So by hook or crook, these folks are going to come up with a way to save it. Even if they have to ignore the obvious and invent a few new gnomes. Even if they have to avoid honest debate with the plasma cosmology community ... Lerner's case being the latest example.