Hubble telescope has found ancient galaxy that scientists say shouldn’t exist

It’s 10.7 billion years old, or rather the light we are receiving from it is 10.7 billion years old (its distance from us being 10.7 billion light-years), which is only three billion years younger than the universe.

It is the oldest spiral galaxy ever discovered, and the reason the scientists say it shouldn’t exist is that “Current wisdom holds that such ‘grand-design’ spiral galaxies simply didn’t exist at such an early time in the history of the universe,” because they take a long time to form. According to David Law of the University of Toronto, the lead author in the study, very old galaxies (meaning galaxies whose images as we receive them are very old), normally “look like train wrecks.”

The article unfortunately doesn’t tell us how large is this galaxy, named BX442.

Robert B., who sent the article, writes:

It’s beautiful—and just proves my point that every time you turn around, science discovers something that proves earlier presumptions wrong. But the scientists never learn from being repeatedly being proved wrong; they always believe that “this time, they have it right.” A little humility would go a long way with those people.

Speaking of a lack of humility, what about David Law’s remark that “The vast majority of old galaxies look like train wrecks”? What a dumb, vulgar thing to say about objects ten billion years old, a hundred thousand light-years across, and each containing hundreds of billions or even tens of trillions of stars. No scientist in 1950 or 1970 would have said it. Law might as well have remarked that “The vast majority of old galaxies look like my teenaged daughter’s bedroom.” Far too often, scientists—like their fellow elites in contemporary liberated society who believe in nothing higher or truer than the disordered human self—seem to have no sense of appropriateness, no inherent respect for anything, for the isness of anything. They must drag everything down to the commonest level and make it appear to be as messy and meaningless as we moderns pride ourselves on being—even objects that are infinitely vaster and older than anything we can conceive, and that express an order of which (notwithstanding scientific theories which claim to explain far more than than they really do explain) we have no idea. For example, while science has learned a lot about the composition and structure of stars and galaxies, its theories about how stars and galaxies came into existence, and why they exist in such profusion, are pathetically lame and unconvincing—basically clouds of hydrogen atoms through the force of gravity somehow just gathered into fusion furnaces with life spans of tens of billions of years, and these fusion furnaces somehow just gathered into revolving galactic structures a hundred thousand light-years wide and each containing hundreds of billions of such fusion furnaces. Yet scientists, standing before this staggering cosmic mystery, act as if they understand why stars and galaxies exist, in the same way that they pretend to understand why living beings exist.

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LA writes:

To avoid misunderstandings of this post, I just want to say: I like science. I’m pro-science. I think science is great. I’m not against science. What I am against is (1) science becoming an agent or creature of the dominent liberal culture; and (2) science making claims for itself that go beyond science. Science has discovered amazing and wonderful things about what goes on inside stars. But when astronomers claim that they know how stars come into being—by hydrogen atoms clumping together so that the gravity of the clump increases and the clump keeps getting bigger and bigger and its internal pressure and heat keep increasing ultimately setting off a helium fusion reaction that will burn for many billions of years—I don’t think that this is scienfic knowledge. It is a guess, a scenario, a theory that is accepted because it conforms to the material reductive view of modern science which says that highly organized self-sustaining entities, such as stars and galaxies and earthworms and elephants, come into being as a result of the purposeless actions of atoms and molecules.

Which leads to the question: how do I think stars came into being? And the answer is: I don’t know, just as I don’t know how new life forms came into being. That is the true answer, and the truly scientific answer. See fourth bulleted point here.

Patrick H. writes:

I think your comment about how early galaxies being described as “train wrecks” is another symptom of the liberal mind is exactly right. After all, if all things progress from chaotic beginnings via cosmological evolutionary evolutionism to culminate in the Alpha and Obama Point of contemporary liberalism, then the olden days of the universe had to have been disordered, ugly, meaningless and futile—in a word, conservative. Galaxies had to look like train wrecks, because that was a long time ago, years and years before evolutionary evolution had enough time to evolutionize everything up from the Republicans and anyway where in all those right-wing train wreck galaxies was support for Sandra Fluke and the contraception that is her right as a woman? Do you think those non-swirly galaxies had any place for women-of-gender or differently documented workers or wedding ceremonies for the sodomitical? I think not! Back in the early train wreck days of the universe—2007, the year before the Big Bang—galaxies weren’t even a tiny bit swirly. How could they be? Evolution hadn’t even evolved yet.

So when you look up at the swirly swirl of the Milky Way galaxy in the night sky and it doesn’t look anything like a train wreck, remember: You didn’t build that. Government did.

LA writes:

I had a first-time commenter say to me “therefore the delusional ravings of an iron-age Jew in the Levant explain everything.” I told him he was the ignoramus he thought I was, and that he was out of here.

Howard Sutherland writes:

Fascinating post, both about Hubble’s latest discovery (I’m a sucker for astrophysics, even if I don’t always understand the math) and about too many scientists’ attitudes about what they really know—and don’t.

Your comment

“[W]hile science has learned a lot about the composition and structure of stars and galaxies, its theories about how stars and galaxies came into existence, and why they exist in such profusion, are pathetically lame and unconvincing—basically clouds of hydrogen atoms somehow just gathered into fusion furnaces with life spans of tens of billions of years, and these fusion furnaces somehow just gathered into revolving galactic structures a hundred thousand light-years wide and containing hundreds of billions of such fusion furnaces. Yet scientists, standing before this staggering cosmic mystery, act as if they understand why stars and galaxies exist, in the same way that they pretend to understand why living things exist”

reminded me of a conversation just this past weekend over drinks at the house of friends.

Among the guests was a mutual acquaintance, a senior officer of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He and I both know James Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix; he very well from working with him on a day-to-day basis for many years, while I know Watson only socially. We were talking—not arguing—about whether the natural sciences and religious inquiry and belief need be incompatible or at odds. I said no, and the CSH officer agreed, although I suspect he has less interest in Christian belief than I do. That got us talking about Watson’s view: while Watson is not actively hostile to religion, in the manner of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris or the late Christopher Hitchens, Watson does not accept religious claims because they cannot be proved using the only proofs he accepts, those of the materialistic scientific method. While I hesitate to criticize Dr. Watson, it’s a rather self-limiting point of view.

The conversation moved on to an article that had recently appeared in The New York Times: “Bits of Mystery DNA, Far From ‘Junk,’ Play Crucial Role.” The article discusses geneticists’ recent discoveries about strands of DNA residing in the human genome that they had previously considered “junk” DNA with no real function. Analogous, perhaps, to the largely unexplained dark matter in the universe that so preoccupies astrophysicists today. It turns out that many of the “junk” gene switches—about four million of them—play a role in human health. The article mentions applications to cancer research, with more surely to be discovered. Just as intriguing to me was learning that what one scientist quoted, Yale’s Mark Gerstein, called a “hairball” of DNA (the very tightly compacted string of genes that lives within the nucleus of human cells) would, if one could extract it and stretch it to its full length, extend for ten feet. Geneticists had previously thought that the bundling of the DNA was essentially random, because so much of it was presumed to be junk and because related bits were often far away from each other—along the hypothetical ten-foot string, that is. It turns out that the bundling exists in such a way that gene switches that need to act on each other are in fact positioned quite close to each other in the “hairball.” Fancy that.

Calling that miraculous creation, the DNA located within the human cellular nucleus, a hairball makes about as much sense to me as what you rightly objected to: referring to the structures of galaxies vaster and more ancient than men can truly conceive as “train wrecks.” There’s a casual hubris in speaking of things that way that both refuses to look beneath the material surface to ask what might create such extraordinary things and why and reflects the untucked-shirt attitude we’re supposed to accept as laid-back post-modern society’s norm.

When our friend, the CSH Lab officer, mentioned that so much DNA can no longer be written off as “junk” and that the human DNA package within the microscopic nucleus is actually about ten feet long, I asked, “Are we really supposed to believe that’s just an accident?” He did not say yes.

LA replies:

“Casual hubris.” Very good. That captures the quality of these people.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 11, 2012 07:50 AM | Send