Cosmic Horizon

While the dense, compact inner regions of today’s most massive ellipticals have already formed around 600 million years after the Big Bang, given that the Universe looks roughly the same in any direction, if we stood on the other side of the Universe looking back at the Milky Way and its smaller satellite galaxies within the Local Group alongside Andromeda, would we question the age and whereabouts of our very own existence? 

If whatever moves is something that feels, motion is its way of communicating. William James’ distinction between transitive and substantive parts — flight and rest — echoes this perspective. Points of gathering and overdensities serve as resting places along the cosmic horizon, where consciousness fades into fragments, flickering from afar. Quenched red galaxies and brighter objects draw waves in the sand with resting castles of early galaxies flying, so to speak, towards the witnessing Earth.

The Universe, in its present form, is a continuity of the past. Moments of agency are branching off the arrow of time, each crossing the Boundary. Those ontologically indeterminate splittings undergo countless physical stages, each acting on the other and so having a time-forwarding effect with freedom hereby displayed. As evolving states take their course, complexity grows inwards and outwards, increasing the probability of transitions into ever more diversely organized states with unforeseen outcomes.

Whether the Universe, a galaxy, or a society is considered to be an animate being, the general struggle is for entropy which becomes available through energy transition. Memory and agency together convert such energy into information. While the cosmic dawn marks the union of time and space, giving rise to two intertwined entities with independent meaning, measurements of their union are electromagnetic in nature.

If information is inherently physical, then light in itself is the message. Photons in the Quantum soup are better known as light among poets who marvel at the sun. While communication builds upon entropy, energy, and information, the motion of photons conveys something fundamental about the theory of everything, that their quantum nature allows them to be captured by stars, planets, black holes, and the human mind. 

 For all we know, the Questioner and the juggler are transcendently something else — a star moving in orbit around a black hole. Once upon a time, two stars were keeping each other company. The acrobat, catapulted into a higher dimension, reveals only its shadow on a flat surface while the Questioner is on a gradual inward spiral. Suffice it to say, they have no clue where their story is going, only that the acrobat’s head has caught up with its other parts. 

The parts had detached from each other and drifted away to prove it wrong. As they reunite with the acrobat’s head, they say in unison, “No, little acrobat, the three red dots squatting your head are crowding your memory. Motion as a tool of expression is not exclusively limited to the palm of your hand.” “Noted.” the little acrobat replies as it pushes upward in the dark. It proceeds to get a better handle on the distant landscape — the physical moment in the history of the Universe when early galaxies began to form and evolve.  

 In the dust-enshrouded scene of the cosmic dawn, the first hydrogen-ionizing photons ignited the early stages of cosmic reionization. Pristine, primordial gas clouds fragmented and collapsed, allowing particles, atoms, and molecules to evolve into stars — supermassive ones — and galaxies. The first galaxies began to form around 100 million years after the Big Bang as small dark matter haloes merged to become larger ones. 

Stretching cosmic time and expanding distances shape reality itself. Uncertainties come from differences in the perception of light and the inferred physical processes involving objects that had been unaccounted for. The little acrobat uncovers a map to open fields. It feels unsettled not only by the back-and-forth with its own parts but also by the realization that there are red dots too in the early Universe, acting like ancestors just like the ones occupying its head. 

Launched in late 2021, the Webb Telescope is designed to observe primarily in the infrared spectrum. As a result, most of the distant objects it has revealed so far are due to this redder coverage. A greater number than expected of very first galaxies, with young age stars outshining older ones, have popped up in the background. Objects, peculiarly brighter, are the most highly star-forming galaxies in the early Universe. 

Young and active formations coexist with primeval, massive red galaxies that appear to have gone into quiescence. While the glow of older stars in young clumps of a galaxy is dominated by the light from most recent bursts and clusters, the darker space between clumps is itself dominated by the dim light of ancient stellar populations. Time is local. Two of them, particularly luminous, GLASS-z12 and GLASS-z10, have built a billion solar mass only 300 to 400 Million years after the Big Bang.

A recent study focuses on eight of those red dots defined by their overly massive black holes, or, alternatively but not equivalently, under-massive galaxies making them look like off-centered blobs. They share features, like extremely high velocities and high densities, with the central regions typically associated with supermassive black holes, except for their nuclear structure and dust properties. Their spectral energy distribution exhibits a distinctive V-shape.

The little acrobat flees, chasing a glimpse of happiness on the cosmic horizon where Earendel nests. Drifting through space, on its circuitous course, freedom prevails. The light of Earendel in the Sunrise Arc left its source about 12.9 billion years ago and spent the intervening time crossing the Universe. A possible individual star system, it was first spotted by Hubble and then by the Webb Telescope.

Somehow the cosmic horizon is sprinkled with seeds of black holes. Primordial massive black holes could be remnants of the very first and exceptionally massive and metal-free stars. So inflated from collisions and accretion, those stars have produced black hole seeds that have become supermassive black holes such as the most distant quasar J0100+2802 which hosts a ten billion solar mass black hole less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang. 

Like the chicken and egg, swirling gas and accreting black holes are not entirely separable events. Over time they follow a coordinated evolutionary path. The mass of a central massive black hole correlates with the luminosity, mass, and velocity dispersion of the galactic stellar bulge. One of those early galaxies, nicknamed Maisie’s Galaxy, existed less than 400 million years after the Big Bang. Another, GN-z11, 420 million years after the Big Bang, hosts a young stellar population, suggesting a rapid build-up of stellar mass. The nitrogen-enriched nucleus amid its particularly massive halo of pristine gas, contains an accreting black hole. A third is a merging system Gz9p3, 510 million years after the Big Bang. 

Most things seem to come in pairs or multiples on their way to be something more, or less, in a chaotic fusion. From the previous post, it becomes clear that there are two sides to every dance of give and take as with mass transfer within close binaries. Given that the majority of massive stars form in binaries or higher order multiples and that one out of every thousand stars ends their lives as a black hole, a large fraction of black holes end up with a companion like in the case of Gaia BH1. 

Within a tightly packed gathering of hundreds of thousands to millions of stars, hierarchical growth of black holes occurs through the formation of binaries, even triple systems, such as the recently observed binary black hole merger GW190521. Simulations demonstrate that if the binary inspiral time is longer than the time until the next galaxy merger occurs, a third massive black hole can enter the system. These triple systems disproportionately occur when the first binary is stalled. Black holes spiral inward and lose energy through gravitational waves, causing them to eventually merge.

The little acrobat consists of a geometry of nine temporal dimensions. Its parts have a mind of their own. While on a flat surface, it appears spatially, yet its body stretches temporally. From necklace beads to Star Queen it once was, it doesn’t have, still, a good bead on things. It is the same dancer who pirouettes around an axis of loops. Its parts balance on top of each other of their own free will. Yet, it sees nothing wrong with tunneling on its natural path — the time domain of Nothingness. It wishes to explore whether Nothingness fits with what is otherwise described as a pre-quantum pre-spacetime theory. And so, it rambles, dragging along its parts, and hones in on its next whereabouts.