The Lifestyle Of The New Man (The New Man in Christ Jesus Series)

A sporty motor to impress Eileen on your first date? We've got a scoder for that. A boot big enough to sleep in at Electric Pick Pick? Room for your three kids. And three more? Peak, small electric plug-in hybrid, diesel or petrol. You've guessed it. There's a brand new scoder for all of that. Dad, who's Nissan? Who? Nissan. Uncle Porx had Nissan. Is he a marshy deal on his cool new car? Nissan. Is new Nissan. Uncle Porx is right. Get 4K your way today. Choose a 4000 Euro finance contribution or trade in bonus on a new Nissan Kashkai, Duke, Xtrail or Arria. Nissan. Always a smart move. However you say it. See Nissan.iE for details. Teasing C's apply. Nissan. DeFi Ordinary. Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos with our soothing Bedtime Astronomy podcast. Each episode offers a gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful slumber under the night sky. Imagine you're looking at this towering, modern skyscraper, gleaming glass, reinforced steel, just this absolute marvel of engineering. Right. A totally finished complex structure. Exactly. And now imagine you are tasked with figuring out exactly how that magnificent structure was actually built. But the catch is you can't look at any blueprints. No instructions. No instructions. And you can't go talk to the architects either. All you can do is search the surrounding landscape for the very first crude, baked clay brick in all of human history. Because if you find that one brick, you basically start to understand the foundation of architecture itself. Yeah, precisely. And today, we're looking at the cosmic equivalent of that very first clay brick. We're taking you on a journey, a massive journey, exactly 13 billion years into the past. Which is just an unfathomable amount of time. It really is. We're going to a moment that's merely 800 million years after the Big Bang. Which, you know, think about that timeline for a second. The universe, which you and I experience as this infinite, sprawling, ancient, expands, it was essentially just a toddler. It was barely getting started. Right. It was transitioning from this dark, featureless void into the glittering, complex cosmos that we actually recognize today. And our guide for this whole journey is a newly discovered, incredibly, ancient, incredibly primitive galaxy. And it's known as LAP1B. Yeah. And studying LAP1B, it forces this really profound shift in perspective. Because when you look up at the night sky, you are naturally biased by the present moment. Sure, you just see what's there right now. Exactly. You see the universe as it is now, or at least as it was relatively recently, in our immediate cosmic neighborhood. You see mature galaxies, complex star systems. You see a universe that's just teeming with heavy elements. Everything's already built. The skyscraper is already there. Right. But LAP1B strips all of that away entirely. It forces you to confront the extreme infancy of everything. I mean, this is a completely different landscape. It's governed by conditions that simply do not exist anywhere in the modern universe. Okay, let's unpack this. Because this sheer, incomprehensible scale of looking back 13 billion years, I mean, it requires us to entirely recalibrate how we think about time and space. It really does. You have to throw your everyday intuition out the window. Yeah. We know the current characters of the universe. We know the modern plot lines. But we've always sort of been missing the very beginning of the story. So finding LAP1B is exactly like suddenly discovering that lost first chapter. The one that sets up everything. Exactly. It's the chapter that actually explains where all the main characters, like the stars, the planets, the literal elements that make up our own bodies, where they came from the first place. And what's fascinating here is that we are not just cataloging some distant inert object, right? We are witnessing an origin story while it is actively unfolding. We're watching it happen. Yes. LAP1B is in the truest, most literal sense of the phrase, of fossil in the making. It's this crucial missing link in the chain of stellar evolution. We are observing the fundamental mechanics of how a dark, totally empty universe first learned how to build a star. But to even begin to comprehend how we can possibly see something that is 13 billion light years away, we have to start with the tool that made it happen, right? We have to talk about the ultimate time machine. Because you definitely can't just grab a pair of binoculars for this. No, not at all. Or even a standard earth-based, high-powered observatory telescope. You can't just spot the dawn of creation from a mountaintop. You certainly cannot. To peer back that far into the cosmic timeline, you require an absolutely unparalleled feat of human engineering. Which brings us to the James Webb Space Telescope. Yes. In this case, we are talking about Webb. Launched in 2021, this is a $10 billion observatory. And it was explicitly purposefully designed to look back in time to the exact epoch when the very first galaxies and stars were just beginning to form. Form out of that primordial darkness. Yeah, $10 billion observatory. Honestly, that price tag always stops me in my tracks. It's a staggering amount of money and effort and risk. It really was the ultimate high-stakes gamble for the scientific community. You have this massive machine and it's folded up like origami inside a rocket. Hoping nothing breaks. Right. Hurtling a million miles away from Earth to its orbit. Where, you know, if a single mechanism jams, the entire $10 billion is lost. Because it's way too far away for astronauts to just hop in a shuttle, go fix it. It had to be perfect on the very first try. It really did. But I want to make sure we clarify this core concept for you listening. Because people throw around the phrase "time machine" a lot in astronomy. And it can sound like science fiction. But if we logic through this, it basically just comes down to the speed limit of light, right? Precisely. It all comes down to the fundamental physics of how light propagates through space. Because light is fast, but it's not instantaneous. Right. Light travels at approximately 186,000 miles per second in a vacuum. Which is incredibly fast, obviously. Yeah, faster than anything else. But on a cosmic scale, it is actually quite slow. It takes time for light to get from one physical place to another. Right. There's a delay. Exactly. When you look at the moon, you are seeing it as it was about 1.3 seconds ago. When you look at the sun, you are seeing it as it was roughly 8 minutes ago. Which means if the sun were to suddenly disappear right now, we wouldn't even know about it for 8 minutes. We have 8 minutes of totally normal sunshine, because the last rays of light emitted would still be in transit. It's still be making that physical journey. Right. Because that's how long the light took to cross the actual physical space between us and the sun. So if we scale that concept up to cosmic distances, I mean, way beyond our solar system, We start dealing with billions of years. Right. So when we point the James Webb telescope at a galaxy that is 13 billion light years away, the light hitting the telescope sensors right this second has been traveling through the absolute vacuum of deep space for 13 billion years. Yes. It began its journey when the universe was only 800 million years old. So therefore, we are not seeing LAP1B as it exists today. We're seeing a ghost. In a way, yes. In fact, the galaxy, as we are seeing it, likely no longer exists in that form at all. I mean, it has had 13 billion years to merge with other galaxies to evolve, to totally change its shape. But we are catching the literal photons it emitted at the dawn of time. It's just mind-bending to think about. Hmm. But this brings up a really massive physical problem. Hmm. Because of space is expanding, which we know it is. It's been expanding since the Big Bang, yes. Right. So the light isn't just traveling through a static empty room. The room itself is getting bigger while the light is moving across it. The fabric of space is literally stretching. So over 13 billion years, the lightways themselves must be getting stretched out too, right? Like pulling on a slinky. That is a crucial piece of the puzzle. And it is exactly why the James Webb Space Telescope was necessary in the first place. The phenomenon you are describing is called cosmological redshift. Cosmological redshift, okay. As light travels through the expanding universe, its wavelength is literally stretched by the expansion of space itself. Visible light, the light we can see with our eyes, like the blue or white light emitted by hot young stars, that has a relatively short wavelength. The waves are tightly packed together. Exactly. But as that light travels for 13 billion years, space stretches that wave out. And longer wavelengths mean the light shifts toward the red end of the spectrum. Yes. And if it travels far enough and is stretched enough, it shifts entirely out of the visible spectrum. It becomes infrared light. Which our eyes can't see at all. No, we are completely blind to it. Yeah. This is what astronomers mean when they refer to something as high redshift. LAP1B is a high redshift galaxy. Because its light has been stretched so far into the red. Right. If you were floating right next to LAP1B 13 billion years ago, it would likely look brilliantly blue or white. But by the time that light reaches us today, it has been stretched so severely that it is entirely invisible to the human eye. And invisible to older telescopes, like Hubble too, which primarily see visible light. Ah. Okay. So that's why webs, mirrors are coated in gold, and designs specifically to capture infrared light. It is built to catch the stretched out ghosts of the early universe. It was engineered specifically to look for that invisible heat signature. But even with infrared sensors, I mean if that light has been traveling and spreading out across the expanding universe for 13 billion years, it has to be impossibly faint. Oh, incredibly faint, just absurdly dim. Isn't it like trying to spot the heat signature of a single lip match on the other side of the planet? How does web actually catch enough of it to see a whole galaxy? Well, the web telescope does have a massive primary mirror. So over 21 feet across, made up of 18 hexagonal burrillium segments. The famous honeycomb shape. Exactly. And it's designed to act like a giant light bucket, just catching as many of those ancient exhausted photons as possible. But the reality is, for an object as small and incredibly distant as LAP1B, even web's massive 21 foot mirror wouldn't be powerful enough to see it on its own. Wait, really? The light is just too diffuse. It's just too diffuse. The telescope alone couldn't have resolved it. So even the most advanced $10 billion piece of technology we've ever built still hits a physical wall. It does. But web didn't do it alone. It had to rely on a quirk of the universe's own physics to boost its power. It utilized a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. Gravitational lensing. Okay, this is where Einstein enters the chat. Yes, this is pure general relativity at work. Because if I remember my relativity, right, gravity isn't just a magnetic like pole. It is actually mass bending the physical fabric of space time. It warps the geometry of space itself. Right. It's like placing a really heavy bowling ball in the center of a trampoline. The fabric of the trampoline dips down, creating a really steep curve around the heavy object. And that is exactly what is happening here, just on a scale that is difficult to fathom. So in simple terms, LAP1B is so distant and so physically small compared to modern massive galaxies that its faint infrared light should be completely imperceptible to us. Should just be a totally blank spot in the sky. Exactly. But sitting perfectly between our telescope and LAP1B, there happens to be a massive cluster of closer galaxies. Just floating right in the line of sight. Yes. This foreground cluster has an immense amount of mass. We're talking billions of stars, huge clouds of gas, and vast amounts of dark matter. So that closer galaxy cluster is our incredibly heavy bowling ball, sitting on the trampoline of space time. Yes. Now, imagine a tiny marble, which represents a photon of light emitted by LAP1B 13 billion years ago, rolling across that trampoline toward Earth. Okay. I'm picturing it. As that photon passes near the deep gravitational dip caused by that massive foreground galaxy cluster, it's path curves. Because it dips into the bowl. Right. The galaxy cluster is literally warping the space around it, and therefore it bends the trajectory of the light traveling through that space. Because light always travels in a straight line. But if the space it's traveling through is curved, the line itself curves. Precisely. The light is just following the shape of space. And because of the highly specific, incredibly lucky geometry of where the Earth, the foreground galaxy cluster and LAP1B are aligned, that warped space acts exactly like a giant optical lens. Wow. And last, magnifying lens, it takes light rays that are spreading apart and bends them back together, focusing them into a single bright point. Gravitational lensing does the exact same thing. It gathers all that lost light. It gathered the faint diverging light from LAP1B and magnified it by an incredible 100 times. Nature's giant magnifying glass. That is wild. The universe essentially built a massive lens out of gravity right where we needed it, so we could see this tiny ancient thing hiding behind it. It was an incredibly fortunate alignment. But hold on, if we logic this out, if a magnifying glass bends light to focus it, doesn't it also deeply distort it? It absolutely does. Think about when you look through the thick glass bottom of a heavy water tumbler. The object on the other side is magnified, sure. But it's also completely warped and stretched out and bent out of shape. So how do we know we are getting accurate information about this ancient galaxy and not just a fun house mirror version of it? That is exactly the problem astronomers face when dealing with gravitational lensing. It absolutely is a fun house mirror. The visual image of the background object is severely distorted. It's not just a clear picture. Not at all. In raw telescope images, gravitationally lensed galaxies rarely look like normal spirals or blobs, their light is often smeared into these long, thin arcs, or sometimes they're stretched into multiple phantom mirror images of the exact same galaxy, just looping around the foreground cluster. Like seeing double or triple. Yeah. So how do we fix it? I mean, we can't just publish a picture of a smeared arc and pretend we know exactly what the galaxy looks like. We can't. And this is where the sheer brilliance of modern astronomers really shines. Specifically, the team led by Kimi Hiko Nakajima from Kanazawa University in Japan. They don't just look at the raw smeared picture and take it at face value. They have to correct the lens. Exactly. They use incredibly complex mathematical models to map the exact mass distribution of that foreground galaxy cluster. So they basically calculate the exact shape and depth of the dip in the trampoline? Yes. By understanding exactly how heavy the cluster is and precisely how it is shaping the space around it, they can run the optical distortion in reverse. Oh, wow. They use algorithms to mathematically unbend the light. They trace the photons back through the warped space to reconstruct the original accurate physical properties of LAP-1B. So they literally untangle the light rays in a computer? Right. So while the visual might be warped initially, the raw data encoded within the light is preserved. And that 100x magnification is the only reason we have enough light to feed into those algorithms in the first place. That is brilliant. They reverse engineer the cosmic funhouse mirror. It's an incredible piece of detective work. And thank goodness they did. Because when they finally capture that magnified light and mathematically stripped away the distortions and looked at what was actually there, they didn't just find a normal sky full of stars. Did they? Astuttoise Maelma's storytelling cansa. Kjetová Fantasia, Kutkutava Roma, Tika, vai henge asalpavia thriller Eita. Granger knows when you're a procurement manager for an office park, you're not managing one building. You're managing all of them. And to stay ahead, you need to see through walls and around corners. Lights about to fail, filters ready to clog, H back on its last leg. If you wait until something breaks, you're already behind. Count on Granger. For quality products, you need to be able to get a lot of money. And you need to be able to get a lot of money. Quality products, easy reordering and 24/7 support. Call 1-800-Greger, click Granger.com or just stop by. Granger. For the ones who get it done. No, they didn't. Taking a visual picture of a galaxy is just the first step. To really understand the physics of what you are looking at, you have to break the light apart. You have to see what's made of. Right. And when Nakajima's team analyzed the incoming light from LAP-1B, they realized a shocking fact about its composition. The vast majority of the light they were detecting wasn't actually coming from stars at all. Not from stars. And if you look at a picture of any galaxy, like our own Milky Way or Andromeda, it's basically just billions of stars shining together. What else could possibly be generating that much light? In the case of LAP-1B, most of the light was emanating from massive, intensely hot, glowing clouds of gas. Glowing gas. Okay, but how can we possibly know that? I mean, how can you look at a dot of infrared light from 13 billion years ago, mathematically unbend it, and then definitively say, ah, yes, that light is being produced by a gas cloud, not a star. By using a technique called spectroscopy. Okay, spectroscopy. Let's dig into that. This is arguably the most powerful analytical tool in all of astrophysics. Instead of just taking a direct picture of the light, scientists pass that light through an instrument on the web telescope called a spectrograph. Which acts like a prism, right? Yes. A highly sophisticated prism. It takes the incoming beam of light and splits it into its component wavelengths, creating a spectrum. And here's where it gets really interesting, because we aren't just making a pretty rainbow to look at. No, it's far more detailed than that. If I understand spectroscopy correctly, it's like passing sunlight through a prism, but this specific rainbow has invisible barcodes hidden inside it. We are looking for specific narrow bands of light that are either missing or shining incredibly bright. Yes, the barcone analogy is perfectly apt. When you look at the spectrum of glowing gas, you don't see a smooth, continuous wash of colors like you do when you look at the light from a solid, glowing object, like a light bulb filament, or even a normal star. It's not a smooth gradient. Exactly. Instead, you see specific, sharp, bright, vertical lines at very precise wavelengths. These are called emission lines. And they exist because of the fundamental laws of quantum mechanics. They're dictating the behavior of light from 13 billion years ago. That is wild. Left breakdown exactly how these lines form because this is the key to everything. It has to do with how electrons behave inside an atom, right? Exactly. Picture an atom within one of these massive gas clouds in LAP-1B. You have the nucleus in the center and electrons orbiting the center. around it. I could tiny solar system. Sort of, but in quantum mechanics, electrons can't just orbit anywhere they want. They are restricted to very specific fixed energy levels or shells. Like rungs on a ladder. Yeah. You just get on the first rung or the second rung, but you can't just hover in the empty air between the rungs. That is exactly it. Now, the environment inside LAP1B is incredibly energetic. The atoms in these gas clouds are constantly being bombarded with energy. Hee gradiation, all of that. Yes. When an electron and an atom absorb some of this energy, it gets excited and it jumps up to a higher rung on the ladder, a higher energy state. But nature prefers stability. Right. Things don't like to stay highly energized forever. Exactly. The electron cannot stay in that high energy state forever. It inevitably falls back down to its original lower rung. An energy cannot be created or destroyed. So when falls back down, it has to get rid of that excess energy somehow. It releases that excess energy as a single photon of light. Ah, there's the light. Yes. And here is the crucial foundational part of spectroscopy. The distance between the rungs on the ladder is entirely unique for every single chemical element in the universe. So the ladders are all built differently. Precisely. The atomic structure of hydrogen is different from helium, which is different from oxygen, which is different from carbon. Therefore, the exact amount of energy released when an electron falls, and consequently the exact color or wavelength of the emitted light is uniquely tied to that specific element. So an oxygen atom dropping an electron emits a completely different highly specific wavelength of light compared to a carbon atom dropping an electron. Yes. Oxygen has its own unique, unalterable set of emission lines. Carbon has its own. Hydrogen has its own. So by looking at the exact pattern of emission lines in the spectrum of LAP-1B, the scientists were literally scanning a chemical barcode. That is just phenomenal. It allows them to definitively decode the exact chemical composition of a gas cloud billions of light years away, simply by measuring the precise wavelengths of how it glows. We don't need to send a probe. We don't need a physical sample of the gas. The light itself delivers the chemical breakdown of the early universe right toward doorstep, neatly packaged by quantum mechanics. It's one of the most elegant concepts in physics. So what did the scientists see when they scanned the barcode of LAP-1B? What was actually in the gas? Well, what was most shocking was what wasn't in the gas. They saw a world that is almost entirely devoid of the chemical elements we take for granted every single day. They found a chemically primitive world. Chemically primitive. What exactly does that mean in an astronomical context? Are we talking just a few missing elements? No, it means that LAP-1B contains almost no heavy elements, whatsoever. In astronomy, the terminology is a bit simplistic. Essentially, any element heavier than hydrogen and helium is referred to as a metal or a heavy element. Even oxygen and carbon. Yes. To an astronomer, oxygen is a metal. And to give you a specific metric from the team's findings, they discovered that LAP-1B's oxygen abundance is roughly 240 times lower than the oxygen abundance found in our own sun today. 240 times lower. So basically, oxygen is practically non-existent in this galaxy. It is barely a trace. It makes LAP-1B one of the most chemically primitive, pristine, star-forming galaxies ever observed in the entire history of astronomy. Now, in our normal everyday lives, we usually think of primitive as a bad thing, right? Sure. Like outdated. Yeah. Like a primitive tool or a primitive piece of technology, something obsolete that needs to be upgraded. But here, primitive is the ultimate holy grail. It means we're looking at something completely untouched. It is the holy grail because a chemically primitive galaxy is an unopened time capsule. If we connect this to the bigger picture of cosmology, you have to understand where heavy elements like oxygen actually come from. Right. Because they don't just exist by default. No, they don't. In the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, the universe underwent a process called Big Bang nucleosynthesis. But the universe was expanding and cooling so rapidly that this process only lasted for a few minutes. Just a few minutes to make everything. And in those few minutes, what was actually created. Almost entirely hydrogen, a good amount of helium, and a tiny, almost negligible trace of lithium. That was it. The entire periodic table, as we know it today, did not exist. The entire universe was just a massive, incredibly hot, expanding soup of those three very light, very basic elements. So where did the oxygen, the carbon, the iron, the silicon, everything that makes up planets and people? Where did that actually come from? They are forged in the core furnaces of stars. Stars are the factories. Exactly. Stars are essentially giant, self-sustaining, nuclear fusion reactors. They spend their entire main sequence lives crushing lighter elements together under immense gravitational pressure and extreme heat to create heavier elements. Like mashing Legos together to make bigger blocks. Right. Four hydrogen atoms are crushed into one helium atom. Then helium is crushed into carbon, carbon into oxygen all the way up the iron. And when massive stars eventually run out of fuel and die in incredibly violent supernova explosions, they blast all those newly forged heavy elements out into the surrounding interstellar space. They pollute the gas around them. And then the next generation stars forms out of that newly polluted enriched gas. Exactly. It is a cycle of cosmic recycling and enrichment. Successive generations of stars seed the galaxy with more and more heavy elements, eventually providing the building blocks for rocky planets, atmospheres, and well, life. Okay, so let's tie this back to the barcode of LAP-1B. If this galaxy has almost no oxygen and almost no heavy elements, that means what we are looking at is the raw original material of the universe. Yes. We're looking at a galaxy so young, so early in the cosmic timeline, the countless generations of stars just haven't had a chance to live, die, and pollute the cosmos yet. It is pristine. We are viewing the original unadulterated hydrogen and helium canvas of the universe right before the major painting begins. It's like walking onto a massive construction site before a single brick has been laid, but all the raw materials, massive piles of pure hydrogen and helium, are just sitting there. Waiting to be ignited. But wait, if there's almost no oxygen, and the gas is mostly pristine, what is actually happening inside those gloring clouds? Because clearly it's not just sitting there totally inert. I mean, it's glowing brilliantly enough for a web to see it 13 billion years later. It is far from inert, and the lack of heavy elements isn't just an empty boring void. It is the exact, highly specific thermodynamic environment required to birth a mythical foundational generation of stars. A mythical generation of stars? Yes. While analyzing those chemical barcodes, the emission lines revealed something else besides just a lack of oxygen. They revealed an environment that was flooded with intense ionizing radiation. Okay, let's define ionizing radiation. Right. Because that means we are seeing photons of light that are so energetic, so incredibly powerful that when they hit an atom, they don't just bump an electron up to a higher rung on the ladder. No, they completely obliterate the structure. They have enough brute force to rip the electron completely off the atom entirely. Yes. It takes a staggering amount of thermal energy to produce radiation that intense, and that specific level of extreme ionizing radiation is exactly the signature astrophysicists expect to see emanating from the very first generation of stars to ever ignite in the universe. Wow. Furthermore, the team measured something highly specific in the gas. They found an elevated carbon to oxygen ratio. An elevated carbon to oxygen ratio, meaning there is slightly more carbon relative to oxygen than we would normally expect to see in a typical star-forming region. Why is that specific ratio so important? Because that specific chemical ratio perfectly matches the theoretical, mathematically predicted signature for the supernova explosions of a very specific, legendary class of objects known as population three stars. Population three stars. Granger knows when you're a procurement manager for an office park, you're not managing one building, you're managing all of them. Count on Granger for quality products, easy reordering, and 24/7 support. Call 1-800-GRanger, click Granger.com, or just stop by. Granger. For the ones who get it done. You're a master of storytelling. You're a master of fantasy, you're a master of romantic, you're a genius, you're a real killer. In the 90s, you're a master of music, you're a master of music. Okay, astronomers have a famously counterintuitive way of naming things, so let's clarify this for the listener. What is the difference between the stars we see in the night sky right now in these population three stars? Well, it is a naming convention based on the order of discovery, rather than chronological age, which is why it sounds backward. The stars we see around us today in the Milky Way, including our own Sun, are classified as population eyestars. Population 1, okay. These are the modern stars. They formed much later in the universe's history, and because they formed from gas clouds that had already been heavily enriched by previous generations of dead stars, they are relatively rich and heavy elements. So our Sun is a population eyestars. It's the news generation. built out of highly recycled, complex materials. Correct. Now, population two stars are older. We find them in the ancient globular clusters orbiting our galaxy. They formed much earlier and therefore have significantly fewer heavy elements. But population three. These are the theoretical first forms of the cosmos. These are the very first stars to ever form out of that pristine, unpolluted soup of pure hydrogen and helium left over from the Big Bang. But why does being made of pure hydrogen and helium make them so special? I mean, the star is a star, right? Gravity pulls gas together until it gets hot enough to fuse. Why do population three stars produce such intense ionizing radiation? Because the lack of heavy elements completely changes the fundamental physics of how the star forms in the first place. How so? To form a star, a massive cloud of gas has to collapse under its own gravity. But as gas collapses, it naturally heats up. And if it gets too hot, the thermal outward pressure, the heat pushing outward pushes back against gravity, stopping the collapse. So the cloud has to have a way to cool down while it's collapsing otherwise just bounces back. Exactly. In the modern universe, heavy elements like carbon and oxygen act as highly efficient cosmic radiators. They absorb the heat of the collapsing cloud and radiate it away into space. Like a cooling system in an engine. Yes. And that allows the cloud to cool, fragment and collapse into many smaller, stable stars like our Sun. Ah. So because LAP1B and the early universe had virtually no heavy elements, those primordial gas clouds had no radiators. None. They couldn't cool down efficiently at all. So without heavy elements to cool the gas, the cloud just remains incredibly hot. And to overcome that immense thermal outward pressure, you need an absolutely massive amount of gravity to force it together. Precisely. Therefore, the cloud can't fragment into small stars. It has to collapse as one gigantic singular mass. Because of this, population third-thirds stars are thought to have been absolute monsters. Just huge. We are talking about stellar behemoths that were tens, maybe hundreds of times more massive than our Sun. So because they couldn't cool down, they just kept accumulating massive amounts of mass until sheer overwhelming gravity forced them to finally ignite. And because they are so massive, the pressure in their core must be unbelievable. The pressure is so intense that they burn their nuclear fuel at a terrifying rate. They burn incredibly hot, incredibly bright, which is what's emitting that intense ionizing radiation we detected. And because they burn so hot, they live very, very short lives. With fast guy young. Exactly. A star like our Sun might live for 10 billion years. A massive population third star might burn through its entire fuel supply in just a few million years. Just a flash in the pan. Cosmically speaking, they were cosmic titans. And when they died, their supernova explosions were of a violence that is truly hard to overstate. Physicist hypothesized they died in what are called pair instability supernovae. Pair instability supernovae. That sounds destructive. It is an explosion so powerful, it entirely obliterates the star. It leaves no black hole behind, no neutron star core, nothing. It just blasts all of its newly forged elements violently out into space. It was these very first Titanic explosions of population third stars that forged the very first carbon, the very first oxygen and ceded the pristine void. The elevated carbon to oxygen ratio that Nakajima's team found in LAP1B that is the literal chemical fingerprint of those ancient explosions. So what does this all mean? We go back to our architectural analogy. If population eyestars like our Sun are like modern skyscrapers made of refined steel and glass built on generations of architectural progress, then population three stars are the very first clay bricks ever baked in the history of the world. They were crude, they were massively bulky, they were incredibly inefficient, but they were the absolutely necessary first step to build everything else. We are literally seeing the evidence of the massive explosions that paved the way for the periodic table itself. You are looking at the foundational architecture of reality being established, is the transition from a simple universe to a complex one, but this brings us to a massive glaring physical contradiction. A contradiction? Wait, what do you mean? What's wrong? Let's logically follow the physics we just outlined. You have these monstrous population third stars. They are burning with intense ionizing radiation and then exploding with the most violent, powerful supernovae the universe has ever seen. Right, parent stability supernova. The sheer kinetic energy of those explosions blowing outward into the surrounding gas clouds should be devastating. Wait, you're entirely right. If they are exploding with that much unimaginable force pushing all that gas outward, why didn't LAP1B just blow itself to pieces? That is the paradox. If the galaxy is incredibly young and relatively small, the force of multiple population third supernovae should have just blasted all that pristine glowing gas out into the deep void. It should be totally dispersed. What kept the gas clouds tethered there for the web telescope to actually see 13 billion years later? That is the exact question the astronomers had to answer. And the solution they found is the final major finding of the study. Okay, what was it? It comes down to kinematics, the study of how things are moving. By measuring the motion and the speed of the glowing gas within LAP1B, the researchers concluded that this ancient galaxy and all its explosive stars is held together by a massive overwhelming halo of invisible dark matter. When you're a maintenance engineer in a beverage manufacturing plant, you keep production lines moving and quality on track because there's no room for slowdowns. With granures vast selection of high quality motors, sensors, belts, and hard-to-find parts, you can get what you need fast in all in one place, so nothing gets in the way of getting the job done. Call 1-800-Grainger, click ranger.com or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done. Count on Granger, for quality products, easy reordering, and 24/7 support. Dark matter, the ultimate ghost of the universe. The invisible glue. Okay, let's logic through how they actually discovered this. How does measuring the speed of the gas tell you that there is a massive cloud of invisible matter holding the galaxy together? It is a matter of orbital mechanics and centripetal force. Think about the classic schoolyard game of tether ball. Right, a ball on a rope around a pole. You have a ball attached to a rope swinging rapidly around a central pole. If the ball is swinging incredibly fast, there is a tremendous amount of outward centrifugal force trying to pull the ball away. Right, and the only thing keeping the ball from flying off into the parking lot is the tension in the rope anchoring it to the pole. And if you hit the ball harder, it goes faster, and you need a stronger rope to hold it. Exactly. Now, in a galaxy, the rope is gravity. The gas and stars are swirling around a center of mass. The astronomers use the spectroscopic data to measure the velocity of the glowing gas in LAP-1B. Because you can measure speed using the spectrum. Yes, through the Doppler effect on those emission lines. And they observed that the gas was moving at a highly elevated velocity, was swirling incredibly fast. Like a tether ball being hit really hard. Therefore, just like the tether ball, there must be a tremendous amount of gravity acting as the anchor. The rope holding that fast-moving gas onto the cosmic merry-go-round and preventing the supernovae from just blowing the whole galaxy apart. So you just calculate the mass of the galaxy to find out how strong the gravity is? Yes. But when the astronomers calculated the total mass of all the visible matter, meaning every single glowing cloud of gas, every single primitive star shining in that galaxy, they realized there was a massive deficit. The numbers didn't add up. The visible normal matter did not generate nearly enough gravity to keep that fast-moving gas anchored. If the visible matter was all that existed, the rope would snap and the gas would just fly off into deep space. The galaxy would literally tear itself apart. But it didn't tear itself apart. We're looking at it. It's there. So there had to be an enormous amount of unseen mass, providing the necessary gravitational glue to hold the entire structure intact. Enormous as an understatement. The vast majority of the mass in LAP-1B is completely invisible. It doesn't interact with light, it doesn't absorb light, it doesn't emit light, it is dark matter. The gravitational pull of this massive dark matter halo is the only thing strong enough to contain the violent explosions of those population-third stars and keep the pristine gas tightly bound together. It's just phenomenal when you pull back and look at the synthesis of all this. I mean, we started with a massive question about the origin of the universe. And to answer it, you have to use literally every tool in the physics playbook. You really do. It's a triumph of multi-disciplinary science. You have the $10 billion web telescope pushing the extreme limits of engineering. You have the universe itself providing a massive gravitational magnifying glass, using Einstein's general relativity. You mathematically reverse a cosmic funhouse mirror. You use the quantum mechanics of electron jumps to read a spectral barcode across 13 billion light years. Yeah, you find a chemically pristine world, acting as a nursery for the monstrous, titanic explosions of the universe's very first stars. And then you realize the only reason the whole thing hasn't blown itself apart is because it is tightly bound in a massive invisible web of dark matter. All these completely disparate pieces of physics come together to create this perfect, unprecedented snapshot of cosmic history. Which brings us directly back to how Kimi Hiko Nakajima described LAP-1B in his team's findings. He called it a fossil in the making and importantly, a direct high-red shift progenitor of the ancient ultra-faint dwarf galaxies observed in the local universe. Okay, let's decode that because we have all the pieces now to understand it. We already understand high-red shift that's the light being stretched into the infrared by the expansion of space over 13 billion years. But what about the rest of it? A progenitor of the ancient ultra-faint dwarf galaxies observed in the local universe. What does that connection actually mean for you and me living right here right now in the Milky Way? While the local universe simply refers to the cosmos immediately surrounding our own galaxy today. If you look at our cosmic neighborhood, the Milky Way isn't alone. It is surrounded by dozens of tiny, incredibly faint dwarf galaxies that orbit around us. Like the Magellanic clouds, right? Exactly. For a very long time, astronomers have looked at these tiny, ancient-looking, local dwarf galaxies and wondered where exactly they came from. What did they look like when they were first born back at the dawn of time? LAP-1B is the answer to that question. It is the ancient ancestor, the progenitor. So LAP-1B isn't going to grow up to be a massive spiral galaxy like the Milky Way. It's going to grow up to be one of those tiny, faint dwarf galaxies that orbit larger ones. When we look at LAP-1B, we are not just looking at a random, isolated object. We are looking at the exact structural equivalent of what our own local dwarf galaxies looks like 13 billion years ago. We are seeing the foundational building blocks of our own galactic neighborhood. Which is incredible. And in fact, large galaxies like the Milky Way are thought to have formed by cannibalizing and merging with dozens of these smaller dwarf galaxies over billions of years. It's like finding a fossilized dinosaur egg exactly at the moment it's hatching, and suddenly realizing that analyzing this egg perfectly explains the anatomy and the evolution of the birds flying outside our window right now. We are literally watching the origin story of the environment we live in today. We are seeing the exact moment the universe began to wake up. This incredibly rare, deeply magnified snapshot of an early stage of galaxy formation shows us the precise era when the very first stars began to fundamentally transform the universe. They sparked the change. They took it from a cold, simple, dark void filled only with hydrogen and helium, and began the violent, explosive process of turning it into the dynamic, element-rich, complex, cosmos we navigate today. It is breathtaking. We've traced the timeline from a dark void to the massive explosions of population three stars laying down the first crucial atoms of carbon and oxygen in a pristine universe. And I think it is vital to connect this cosmic history directly back to you, the listener. Because it's your story, too. It really is. Because it is very easy to treat this as just, you know, abstract physics happening impossibly far away an unimaginably long ago. But this is your history. It is the most intimate history you have. Absolutely. The carbon structuring your DNA, the iron pumping through your bloodstream, the oxygen you're breathing into your lungs at this exact second. Those elements were not created in the Big Bang. They did not exist at the dawn of time. They were forged in the furious, violent, crushing hearts of stars, and they were scattered across the vacuum of space in massive supernova explosions. Every single atom of heavy material in your body, everything that makes you a physical being was manufactured in a stellar furnace. You are quite literally made of star stuff. Exactly. An LAP-1B shows us a time before those elements existed in abundance. We were essentially looking at a universe before he was physically capable of making us. It was just getting started. It was baking the very first clay bricks of reality, figuring out how to build the foundation for planets, biology, and eventually consciousness. And if we truly consider the magnitude of that, it leaves us with a deeply profound perspective on our place and time. We noted earlier that our own son, a modern population I star, has roughly 240 times more oxygen than the glowing gas of LAP-1B. Our son is packed with it compared to LAP-1B. Think about what that multiplier actually represents in terms of cosmic labor. It means that every single atom of oxygen we breathe required 13 billion years of relentless, violent stellar deaths to accumulate to the levels we rely on today. A chain reaction, a destruction of rebirth. It is a slow, agonizingly long, unimaginably violent process of cosmic enrichment, which honestly makes you wonder if a primitive foundational relic like LAP-1B was hiding out there completely invisible, just waiting for the perfect alignment of one gravitational magnifying glass to be seen. What else is hiding in the dark? What other impossible structures, what other ancient ghosts of the early universe are just sitting out there silently orbiting in the deep void, waiting for an even bigger lens to finally bring them into the light. Granger knows, when you're a procurement manager for an office park, you're not managing one building. It's about to fail, filters ready to clog, H back on its last leg. Count on Granger for quality products, easy reordering and 24/7 support. Call 1-800-GRanger, click Granger.com or just stop by. Granger for the ones who get it done.