Comment by voxleone
4 days ago
Upon reading the title, I would have expected some gravitational redshift to be part of the explanation, which made me wonder—are we sure none of that deep gravity well effect is contributing to the redness? That said, I understand the community tends to favor AGN-related causes: rapid Doppler broadening of emission lines, infrared dust reprocessing, and cosmological redshift seem to account for most of what’s observed.
The redshift in the early universe is actually why the JWST is an infrared telescope. Hubble was limited to higher wavelengths and couldn't see objects that were excessively redshifted.
But no in this case these objects are red even in comparison to nearby objects.
There's already a ton of redshift from the universe expanding, so they're definitely correcting their spectra for some amount of redshift. I'd love to know if there's a way to tell the two sources of redshift apart, or if significant redshift from climbing away from the hole just makes it look a smidge farther away.
But honestly I'd guess that the light is emitted too far from the horizon to be redshifted very much by the black hole.
I'm no astronomer trying to have work published, but wouldn't a mistake like that be one of the most obvious things to attempt to test your own work against before releasing the results? Is the fear of releasing an obvious mistake and the damage to one's reputation just not present anymore, or is first to publish so critical that mistakes are forgiven? To me, if I was going to present a paper that goes against existing conventional thinking, I'd want to make sure my paper stood up to the most rigorous review including (especially?) from HN commenters.
Fair point — I don't think gravitational redshift was completely ignored, but perhaps it was ruled out early and not discussed in the public-facing article. In most astrophysical observations, especially with JWST, cosmological redshift and AGN mechanisms usually dominate the interpretation, but I agree: when something challenges conventional thinking, even “obvious” effects deserve a clear mention or elimination.
I think your comment/complaint is indicative of something I've mused about for a while in regards to science articles - I wish there were a level of common scientific publication somewhere between "novice" and "expert".
I don't need it explained to me like I'm five, but I would like it explained to me like I'm a curious student who's taken a course or two on the subject.
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