Astroboffins find most distant source of oxygen in the universe Astrophysicists have detected the most distant signal of oxygen yet, in a galaxy more than 13 billion light years away, when the universe was less than 4 per cent of its current age. A paper published in Nature shows that the galaxy, MACS1149-JD1, was surprisingly mature enough to be forming abundant amounts oxygen at such a …
It's not that surprising to me - the first galaxies were from a much more compact universe that had the same amount of matter in it as exists now, which would have resulted in huge quantities of supergiant stars over several formation cycles that had quick life spans and produced large quantities of elements as they went up the periodic table prior to going nova/supernova/ubernova.
Only the first 25 elements past hydrogen are produced in stars. All the other naturally occurring elements were made from supernova events.
Still, the early universe must have been a hot, busy place. The only modern phenomenon that approaches this kind of frenetic thermodynamic activity is venture capital money being burned by startups.
venture capital money being burned by startups
Poingnantly, most of this is fake money cooked by central banks, with corresponding unresolved opposite-sign debt floating around in government ledgers, similar to positive-energy matter having an opposite-sign unresolved "debt" floating around in its gravitational field, the whole summing to zero.
At least nobody is getting undeservedly rich off the gravitational field.
Only the first 25 elements past hydrogen are produced in stars. All the other naturally occurring elements were made from supernova events.
That's what we used to think, until recently. It has been known for a while that the r-process in supernovae can't account for the quantities of elements past iron that we see. Colliding neutron stars are responsible. See this highly respected scientific journal for a few more details.
Pretty amazing to think 13+ billion years ago a black hole in one universe opened a white hole to start forming ours. Only other possibility I have seen making much sense is quantum tunneling of a scalar field value. Still probability wise much easier to assume we are not the first universe.
Except the universe is not contracting and looks like it never will so always leary of supporting some cyclical theory that says this time its unique. Plus anything with string theory is pretty much a no go as with that whole brane collision crap. General relativity already allows for white holes and they think they might have even seen one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRB_060614 .Makes sense because time's arrow in reverse can't go past the moment of the white hole which is pretty much the definition of a white hole. Of course Hawking was about a billion times smarter than me and he leaned towards the quantum tunneling explanation IIRC so yeah that is probably it. Still bubbles of universes forming out of existing universes nearly infinitely is mighty tempting and doesn't require ours to be unique in any way.
"Still bubbles of universes forming out of existing universes nearly infinitely is mighty tempting and doesn't require ours to be unique in any way."
"Nearly infinitely" makes no sense. It's either finite or infinite. The gap between N (where N is a "nearly infinite" value and infinity is the same as the gap between 1 and infinity. Which, in both cases is infinity.
If this bubble of universes is infinite, than you're basically saying it's turtles all the way down.
If this bubble of universes is finite, then there must be a start at some point, where you can't call on a previous universe as the progenitor. Thus you're really just doing a time-reversed version of kicking the can down the road in explaining the origins of existence. At some stage you have to stop relying on "so, there was one before and..." and actually explain things.
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