Has JWST found evidence for the FIRST STARS to ever form in the Universe?
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- čas přidán 17. 05. 2024
- AD | To try everything Brilliant has to offer-free-for a full 30 days, visit brilliant.org/drbecky and you'll get 20% off Brilliant's annual premium subscription. | One of JWST’s main goals has always been to find evidence of the first stars to form in the Universe. And this month there’s a paper been published by Maiolino and collaborators claiming to have found just that, around a galaxy known as GN-z11 (the previous record holder of most distant galaxy known). But claims of evidence of the first stars in the universe, aka population III stars, are not be made lightly. So in this video we’re going to chat about (1) what are population III stars? (2) why are they so important in the history of the universe? (3) the evidence that Maiolino et al. claim to have in GN-z11, and (4) what’s next to confirm/refute this?
Maiolino et al. (2024; evidence for pop III stars around GN-z11) - arxiv.org/pdf/2306.00953.pdf
Wang et al. (2022; first claim of population III stars in un-peer reviewed article) - arxiv.org/pdf/2212.04476.pdf
Baade (1944; separation of stars into population I and II) - articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/p...
Thornton Page (1966; first written use of"population III" stars) - www.science.org/doi/10.1126/s...
JWST program 1181 - www.stsci.edu/jwst/phase2-pub...
JWST program 4426 - www.stsci.edu/jwst/phase2-pub...
JWST program 2926 - www.stsci.edu/jwst/phase2-pub...
My previous video on GN-z11 and the discussion over whether it has a growing supermassive black hole or not - • JWST & the BIG DEBATE ...
Shorts playlist decorating my new office space - • Renovating my new offi...
00:00 Introduction
02:06 What are "Population III" stars (aka the first generation of stars)
05:43 Why are Population III stars so important in the history of the Universe?
08:24 New evidence for Population III stars from Maiolino et al
12:18 What's next to confirm/refute this claim of Population III stars?
14:09 Brilliant | AD
15:22 Bloopers
Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV
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👩🏽💻 I'm Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford (Christ Church). I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don't know. If you've ever wondered about something in space and couldn't find an answer online - you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars.
drbecky.uk.com
rebeccasmethurst.co.uk - Věda a technologie
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When your paper's font is ambiguous enough that the gas with significant Helium II emission appears to be labeled "Hell clump".
If astronomical spectroscopy is finding evidence of *Hell* in galaxies, we’re in big trouble.
Fraunhofer should have left well enough alone!
I believe it was intentional.
Maybe it should have been He-ll.
@@NWViewer1 A chemist would use He(II). Then again, if it's hot enough to doubly ionize helium, "Hell clump" isn't far off the mark.
@@jpdemer5 The II means singly ionized, not doubly ionized. If one writes only I, that means neutral.
I realize the definition of "metals" is broader in astrophysics, but it's still a bit jarring to hear carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen referred to as "metals."
Yeah, saying Pop III is a funny name when you call anything higher than Helium a metal is worse to me!
Agreed. Astronomers need to understand that the word metal already has a definition. This is confusing beyond reasonableness.
@@MRichK Try breathing oxygen as a metal that could shorten your life. HAHAHA.
@@Thomas154321 Interested need to understand that each area has their own definitions, symbols for the same quantities et cetera because of convenience - and yes, history.
I literally first heard this yesterday listening to DrBecky's audiobook.
I'm pretty sure Douglas Adams makes a nod of a joke about the naming convention of pop I-III stars in the Hitchhiker's Guide series when he reveals that Zaphod is Zaphod the first and his father and grandfather, be Zaphod II and III (resp.). So...yeah, funny, and weird enough to have appeared in pop sci-fi shortly after Pop III was first discovered.
I do not remember this but it seems you must be right. Only stars have this crazy generation numbering.
Ah, but that was due to a mix-up with contraceptives in a time machine IIRC. So entirely different physics. 😀
@@latheofheaven1017 True. 😃
42
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love the anton cameo ahahah
Anton shouldn't be included, his opinions are usually aweful. He's not a scientist and he's not as good as an educator as Kyle if comparing apples to apples.
@@mr702s "Wow" -Owen Wilson
Never take your news from a single source
Anton does good work getting science papers out to the general public
Rt 😂 I love Anton
@@mr702s ahhh yes and you some random on the internet thinks you are smarter than absolutely everyone and can say whether or not what they say is true, even though anton reads and makes real scientific papers easily digestible you must know so much more
Watching your videos, listening to your audio book helps me to believe that I can succeed in science as well. I’m definitely older than you but I went into nursing because it was something I grew up with as my mom was a nurse. But when I get up in the morning my heart & brain want astronomy related information. I’m gonna get myself back into school, gotta start with math. Thank you. Keep doing what you’re doing, it’s inspiring and making a difference.
That’s so incredible to hear Kim ❤️ good luck with your journey back into school - you’ve got this
I envy you and wish you the best of success with your return to learning.
I'm so used to her old room reverb, my mind was like tricked in to thinking something was wrong.
This means I watched way too many of her video's.
Which is a good thing.
“ I think one thing we can say for sure is that *we haven’t heard the last of GN-z11 just yet!* ”
- Dr. Becky Jan 11, 2024
I think the naming starts make sense when you add pop3 stars.
We count outwards from youngest to oldest stars.
It would be much worse if we had to rename the new oldest stars into pop 1 every time we discovered one.
pop 0, then pop -1, then pop -2 and so on. ;)
@@bjornfeuerbacher5514oh that’ll confuse me even more, never liked counting generations backwards
Your videos are always so well organized and built with the basics, the details, the discussion, and the awesome discoveries and implications. Gorgeous footage topped off with the original papers from astronomys origins in the past. I never miss your videos. Thank you.
Similar to pop-3 naming, that the charge that an electron happens to have was named negative by Ben Franklin was a similar historical accident that has made electrical engineering confusing ever since.
Not really. It was Franklin's notion that charge flows from + to - that makes electronegativity slightly confusing. But even that is fine _in most cases_ since current carriers of either polarity make just as much sense for current flow. This becomes clear in semiconductors, where they literally talk about positive charge movement as HOLES moving around. Also, electron mass is much smaller than proton mass, so protons being + and electrons being - is quite appropriate. With that larger mass, protons do not move around as easily, so even the symbol choice itself is appropriate there.
Note how they frame it as “Possible”, which is absolutely the correct way to go about this
Bloopers made me think of Ever After:
"Good heavens, child, are you alright?"
.... "There was a bee."
Nice shoutout to my boy Anton! He's great for covering new science papers :)
Really loved the cameo by The Wonderful Person Anton.
I love this presentation technique you've been using for awhile, where you give the intro, list the questions, and answer them.
You should rightly be proud of your blue wall. 😁
Thank you so much for making cutting edge science so accessible! If you can call something that many billion light years away "accessible," that is! The important thing for me is that you explain to us what needs to come next. You help us find our location on the map of knowledge, as it were.
"Metal" in glassblowing means molten glass, and in roadbuilding means stones, both of which are not conductive chemical elements but compounds, such as silicon dioxide, or mixtures thereof. Astronomers and ordinary people agree that lithium and iron are metals, and as astrophysics doesn't care about the conductivity or ductility of elements at room temperature, I think that calling oxygen and carbon "metals" is fine in that context.
Shoutout to muh boy Anton!
SHOUT!
No
I don't see any reason for enthusiasm, Becky has much better relevance.
@@torbjorn.b.g.larsson Bro what are you talking about? If Anton didn't have any relevance why did Dr. Becky put him in the intro montage? It's not like you have to pick only one science communicator and Stan for them. Anton and Frasier Cain (also in the intro bit) put out tons of good science stuff nearly every day.
Hip😊😅😮😢🎉 Who-Ray!😂🤫🤔👌👽👍🇺🇸🚀🧐🛸🇬🇧🇨🇦🍁 12:26
JWST has exceeded my expectations from day 1. Let's see if this study can be confirmed, it would be amazing to have finally found one of the holy grails of astrophysics.
This is what excited me most about JWST
The blue wall is cool.
🤔 The opposite wall must be red.
I'm a scientific genius.
I finally understand the generation numbers and how they formed.
It's actually good luck that stars of decreasing "metallic" content are named with increasing numbers. Look what happened in thermodynamics, where a foundational zeroth law had to be inserted. Now, if ever we observe something that fuses hydrogen into helium yet is somehow even more primitive than population III stars - those will be population IV.
Of course, you have the same problem in reverse, and even worse. There will definitely be another generation after Population I, and what will we call those? Fortunately, we won't face that problem for millions of years, but there you are, lol.
But what happens when we find a star that is even younger, with even heavier elements than we have so far discovered? Population 0 stars? 😂😂😮
Ummm, no. Stars of all "populations" burn hydrogen to helium.
I don't see why people get hung up on the naming of the "populations". The first population differentiated from just "stars" was population 2 - with everything else being population 1 ; historically the next population differentiated were population 3 ... and it could go further (but the window of both time and differentiation is closing, rapidly). The problem comes from people trying to impose an formation sequence onto a discovery sequence.
@@a.karley4672what about stars that fuse helium to lithium
@@keithmoorechannel we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it in a few billion years
Thanks for being a wealth of information Becky!
And that was a great update!!
Similar problem with electrons being negative. Franklin just confused everyone because he guessed incorrectly.
Lighting and setup in the new room is on point (love the blue)! Great vid as always
Thx for being there 😊
I like how you said what we were all thinking about the naming convention.
I think they understood enough to know that they could be missing some data, and most likely assumed that there would be stars with less or no metal comtaimination, but on a scale, therefore you would start with the worst case as 1 and go from there....at least thats how i make sense of it.
love the segment with all my other favorite space channels.
Brilliant!
You are doing a great job explaining us how you recognize from which era the light of a star originated. I learned about the spectral stripes some forty years ago in school, but never really understood why are they in the spectrum. Thanks a lot!
Always love your explanations it helps me to understand without having a big gap at the same time you posit that we still don't know everything. We/you are still striveing for more answers
Fantastic video, with exciting information so well presented! As always. As a chemist I just tensed up when you called all the elements heavier than helium "metals". Perhaps it is a convention amongst astronomers, but there is a sharp distinction between metals and non-metals, not to mention the noble gases ....
That explanation was a little bit over my head, but I think you said the first stars formed in the universe happened a long time ago.
As usual incredible explanation and great information. thank you for the great detail in your work.
The naming does make sense when you consider the order of discovery. Population 1 is the first population that were seen clearly and analyzed. Population 2 were the 2nd group we were able to analyze closely, so, naturally, this would be the 3rd population to be more closely looked at and that we're beginning to analyze.
I guess that means in a few billion years we’ll finally get to see the formation of the first population IV stars
more Becky, love how much you enjoy your profession.
Great video thanks for sharing your insights keep the videos coming love al your content and the bloopers brighten my day 🍻👍
bless you!
sounds better, love the new lighting setup on new studio too,
about the papers and the size of the galaxy/stars; missing a point, universe was smaller back then too.
Great video!
7:18, I think saying the stars "have to" fuse hydrogen in order to counter gravity sounds very weird. I have seen a lot of scientists/science communicators say something similar. It sounds like stars are consciously trying to do that. May be they do it to make the point in a shorter time, but I think it will be much better for the people who do not know the process, to explain how it really happens.
I get your point but like, what’s the alternative? They’re “required” to? That makes it sound like someone’s telling them what they have to do
Nice new office ❤
LOOOOOVE you showed your fellow communicators!! a massive collaboration would be...(dare i?)...stellar. :D
The ending of the bloopers was one of your best yet, No Doubt about that!
Well, if we had named these populations of stars chronologically, we would have to reshuffle the naming each time we find an older population.
I think from that point of view it makes sense to start the numeric naming at the youngest stars.
Would not be necessary to reshuffle if just adding one earlier population. If Pop. I and Pop. II had originally been reversed then the earlier stars could be Pop. zero (Like the laws of thermodynamics).
@@DavidBush-wm1fewhat if we discover something younger than population 0? Do we go into the negatives?
@@oberonpanopticon What stars would be younger than the first stars?
Dr. Becky, can you do a reaction to 3 Body Problem?
Very interesting indeed! Thanks, dr. Becky! 😃
I hope they can study this further!
Stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
Fascinating as always!
The irony is this; although oxygen isn't a metal, hydrogen is at extreme pressure close to absolute zero.
Actually all you need is pressure to get metallic hydrogen
Anton cameo in a Dr Becky video!
Well explained as always Dr Becky. Love your stuff. Thank you for what you do!!!
I like Helium 2 being shortened to "Hell" it accurately describes the conditions in that clump
All my favorite science heads in under a minute 😊 i love you guys and gals
The population sequence makes sense to me. If I am population 1 and the current generation my parents are population 2 and so on. As for the generations to come they can get alpha names like Gen z and alpha are now.
Thanks
Love that you put a short clip from Anton at the beginning. Dr Becky and Anton are my two most favored channels on CZcams. Dr. Becky's passion is obvious but she is also amazing at breaking down and explaining research to those of us who love astronomy/astro-physics but aren't scientists. Antov has no formal training or education in the area astronomy/astro physics yet you'd never know it. Both of them gives us passionate non-scientists hope of understanding and staying informed about the Universe.
Was waiting for this video for so long....
I don't mind the "Population" names attached to stars. But, please promise me Dr. Becky when you discover exactly what "dark matter" truly is, that you will fight to the bitter end to give it a proper name. We can't just call it dark matter forever.
Honestly, if it's found to be a new phenomenon, it might just stay dark matter. Same as what happened to X-rays.
Why
@@SahasaV I know, I've often felt too that "X-Rays" should be renamed now that we have a much clearer understanding of what they are.
Harry Cliff, a particle physicist who works at the Large Hadron Collider, has written an entertaining book called "Space Oddities". A quote: "When you hear the word 'dark' used by physicists, you should get very suspicious because it generally means we don't know what we're talking about."
@@SahasaVI think it's realistically going to depend if it's a family of particles or just a single particle.
The population I, II and III thing is kind of weird but one good thing about keeping all the naming stuff consistent is that you can then go back and read old astronomy books and papers and know what people were talking about, whereas if you changed all the names reading them now would be incomprehensible.
Yes, indeed.
Great summary and good teaching Becky.
I got one for ya: those proto stars that formed within the primordial cloud call "the Dark Ages", the ones that caused the cooling of the plasma cloud by condensation, that ended the Dark Ages, that may even have formed black holes, would be population 4 stars and be something like brown quark dwarfs. Just a thought.
I think they'd still be pop-III stars b/c they would only have hydrogen and helium. One of the bits of evidence for the big bang is that you can do the math on the early universe and at one point it was all hydrogen ions (i.e. protons and electrons) with conditions similar to the core of a star - and you can calculate how long it was in that state and therefore what the ratio of hydrogen to helium would be, and you end up with the correct amount.
Actually, what I'm talking about is "stars" made from the quarks that made up the plasma cloud at the beginning. Something caused that plasma to cool down and condensing mass in the form of quarks, cause, maybe, by shock waves from the Big Bang, beginning the process that led to actual star formation. These proto stars would not be huge, like the gen 3 stars but small and many, like brown dwarfs, in the confined space of the first event. This is, of course, a speculation but one worth thinking about. @@takanara7
I’m familiar with _brown dwarfs_ and the hypothetical _quark stars_ … but what would “brown quark dwarfs” be like? Something like a very low mass quark star, such as what some (not most) researchers speculate that pulsar *PSR B0943+10* might be?
Do we have a general understanding of how easy it would be to detect population 3 stars given the current age of the universe? For a hypothetical example, imagine that it is 1 billion years ago and we had the JWST and all our same knowledge back then. Do we know proportionally know how easier it would be to detect them given they would be closer in space and time to us? Maybe through that understanding we can get a better statistically relevant number, like what the odds of us being able to detect them given the universes current age and the distance of the galaxy and star we are analyzing so we could get a sense of how many ancient galaxies we would have to survey to get a probable chance of finding one
Hi Becky. I listen to your podcasts and enjoy them. I'm a member of an astronomy club in Gloucester, ma.
Listening to your explanation of population 3 vs. 2 vs. 1 stars and the inconsistancy made me think about the term reionization .
I worked in the semiconductor industry where our machines made ions. When you say it was hot in the beginning and it cooled enough to reionize particles to become atoms that confused me more. I thought ions were made when electrons were removed from an atoms surroundings. The term "reionize" sounds like removing ions rather than putting them back.
It should be deionize as in the atoms have required their electrons, making them atoms again. This term reionize might be another misuse of a term. 😅
this is unrelated but your new filming setup paired with your camera makes you look so good!
Love the new room! 😊Your blue eyes really shine with that wall color.
On the subject of poor naming decisions that have stuck around, little compares to Franklin's accidental creation of "conventional" current flow. Everything in electronics is precisely backwards, and we really should just all agree that electrons are positive, not negative, and then we can keep conventional current markings on existing components (e.g. the 'negative' band on a diode) while not being wrong. We'd have to re-label batteries, I guess.
What are you talking about? We'd need to relabel everything with a + and -, and we'd also also have to rewrite all the rules about electricity and magnetism interact - since you have magnetic fields rotating counterclockwise around an electric current - if you switched negative and positive then you'd have to switch it to clockwise, which would melt people's brains and also require replacing every textbook and diagram about electromagnetism. And for basically no reason since protons CAN carry charge (for example in a proton on positive ion beam)
Precisely @@takanara7
Outstanding, as usual!
Splendid video, as always.
I'm delighted that I was sat here wondering "how is it possible that they can get an image from that far away without there being some crap in the way".
I was pondering that that probably speaks to just how big the universe is, then you casually answer the question for me.
Nice!
This Ankol Laberators guy seems to really get around. Seems like he's involved in every paper Dr Becky talks about.
Dr. your sound needs some tweaking. The new office is echoing slightly.
She just needs something _other_ than the omnidirectional mic (which naturally picks up all the room reverb) she’s using here, such as the lapel microphone she _used_ to use before the move.
Perhaps it got lost in the move?
@@ahcapella a lavalier would help, or an overhead, out of shot boom mike
Them wedgy square things stuck on the wall may help. Ironically the new better mic probably makes the reverb more noticable. The blue wall is indeed very nice 🙂
@@AbAb-th5qe Foam rubber acoustic panels?
@@ahcapella um, yeah. I didn't know what they were called. I see a lot of youtubers have them.
The mic is a bit better but the reverberation is quite a bit more as you suspected. I’m very happy for your new setup though! Great work
Love your new room!!!
2:59 who else sees the Old man with a moustache face?
Probably everyone sees the old man face. Humans are so anthropomorphic. Just like the “face” on Mars which most people see in one of the Viking 2 photos from 1976.
@@RGF19651 But, but…ancient civilization…Martian pyramids…ruined city!
(jk)
@@ahcapella oops! Forgot about the origin. 😉
Haha Anton
I kinda hope it is Pop 3 and not just a black hole, we live in such a great time for cosmology!
Fraser and Anton spottings in the first few seconds‽ Gonna be a great video! ❤❤
Astronomy: Where the brightest object are called black holes and the first generation of stars is called Pupulation III.
Population I stars, brought to you by the same people who gave the electron a positive charge and said flows from + to -
Yes, I have severe emotional damage from years of calculating hole flow.
And for the same reason as here: a convention set before more recent and complete knowledge turned it "backwards"
@@kjdude8765 more importantly before they realized the emotional damage it would inflict on generations of students.
@@hugegamer5988 electricity is magic anyways, so it can be re-wizarded.
Oooohh the audio sounds so much better :3
Way cool Becks. Thanks.👍
Pluto was a name we were stuck with...if it can be demoted we can rename pop III stars
maybe start counting them with negative numbers so it makes more sense? hahha i love the pluto analogy
Why bother? What would be gained? What would the costs be?
Thanks so much for creating and sharing this educational and entertaining video.
I doubt that no one will ever find the starting point of the world or the moment of its beginning. The madness and magnificence of people's greatness.
Just a quick note. I finally decided to try Brilliant, but when I looked at there Terms & Conditions one thing I became aware of made me leave IMMEDIATLEY!! They have AUTOMATIC RENEWAL! Terrible, invasive idea, no way I will EVER sign up to ANYTHING that does that. Now if they change THAT, then I am up for it. To be frank, I really really did not expect them to be using that NASTY service option. Bad on you BRILLIANT. In FACT, that is NOT Brilliant at ALL!!
Pretty much everything that involves a monthly fee automatically renews... Do you use Spotify or similar music streaming service? Automatic renewal. Do you subscribe to Netflix or similar streaming service? Automatic renewal. Do you pay your mortgage or rent by direct debit, or similar bank transaction? Guess what?
If you only want to pay for one month then it's entirely on you to cancel your subscription, etc, before it renews. That's the standard that literally everyone else uses.
Thanks, Dr. Becky~
Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Annie Jump Cannon, Williamina Fleming, and Antonia Maury all should have been mentioned.
really important, well explained,
Thank you Dr Becky for having a straight forward astronomy channel. Especially concerning JWST a which has been a subject falling victim lately to trash clickbait vids with Christian apologist thumbnails A LOT. Very tired of them.
17:30-
"These stars would have been incredibly bright, but wouldn't have lived for very long."
"The candle that burns twice as bright burns for half as long, and you have burned so very, very brightly Roy..."
**Eldon Tyrell**
🍄
While much is uncertain about these observations, what is certain is that you have piqued my interest in it. When the only two known options for these observations is the first ever stars in the universe or evidence of an early smbh growing, the only possible outcome is "Wow!!!"
This is the best explanation of this topic I have ever come across. Thank you for educating my simple brain.
Wow, that galaxy is far, far away.
Every time I watch your videos, my brain hurts. Thankfully you are a great explainer of things.
The lighting in the new space is incredible
cant wait for pop 4 stars to come out and we will need new science
"The naming of the population of stars is weird."
Planetary Nebulae-
"Hold my beer..."
🍄
Primordial Stars
Ancestral Stars
Ancient Stars
Sounds majestic.
The star population naming makes sense. We cannot see a population younger than now, whereas it is always possible we could find earlier and more distant populations.
Maybe they had a foresight about discovering older stars than population II? They wouldn't want the rename and confuse everyone with "The older population is now class I, the current I becomes II and II is renamed to III"
Oh hi Anton! I see you there!
Great vid Dr Becky! Thanks. Could you soon slot in an attempt at an explanation for your regular stars "need" to fuse faster or fuse heavier elements to "resist" gravity, like you repeated in this vid at 7:20, please? I wonder why old stars swell up and get hotter like the sun will apparently in future, it cannot be a need to resist the pull of gravity. Cheers!
Dr Becky, you're such an amazing pedagogue ❤️ thanks