dr-becky 4 months ago
astrophysicist #Space and Time

JWST shows the early Universe is Different than we thought

Remember those overmassive galaxies that JWST found that people claimed proved "the big bang never happened?" when in reality it was just that we couldn't explain how they'd got so big?

Well, turns out those galaxies probably aren't that massive after all. In this video we're chatting about how new JWST observations have found evidence that galaxies in the early Universe form different types of stars at different rates to in the Milky Way, called the Initial Mass Function of stars.


This then has knock on effects on the calculation of the masses of these distant galaxies...


00:00 - Introduction

01:46 - Ground News AD

03:19 - How we calculate the masses of galaxies & what's an IMF

07:02 - What's a top-heavy IMF and why it solves JWST's "over-massive" galaxy problem

08:48 - Evidence for a top-heavy IMF in the early Universe

12:51 - Some caveats and what's next...

15:56 - Bloopers

Dr Becky Smethurst
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