Shadowing-Übung: We Found Galaxies Too Old for the Universe - Englisch Sprechen Lernen mit Video

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The James Webb Space Telescope found galaxies  that are too ancient-looking for our young universe. Now you may have heard that, but  JWST keeps finding them, and our recent efforts to solve this conundrum point in wildly  different directions. Have we found galaxies older than the universe, or did we just learn  something incredible about how galaxies form?
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Next up. Today’s episode is part of  PBS Earth Month! PBS is celebrating by releasing a ton of great new episodes diving  deep into our amazing planet. In particular, you might enjoy the latest latest Be  Smart, which explores the math, science, and history of the Mercator Map, a flawed  work of genius that, in more ways than one, changed the world. Links to that episode and the  full Earth Month playlist in the description!
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Next up we’re excited to announce our  third celebration of a galaxy far, far away with our Return of the Geodesic  merch. Because whether you’re following a geodesic on a closed universe or reliving  your favorite saga, you’ll always know where you’ll end up! And now until May the  4th there’s 10% off the whole merch store, with special deals if you combine your order with  previous May the 4th merch. Now on to the episode.
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Telescopes are time machines. Light takes time to  get to us, so we see distant objects as they were when their light began its Earthward journey.  As our telescopes become more powerful they see further, and so more and more of the past  becomes accessible to us. The James Webb Space Telescope is one of the most powerful time  machines ever built. It’s powerful enough that it’s discovered galaxies whose light has  been traveling to us since the universe was a little over 2% of its current age. The  universe back then should look different, right? Those galaxies should look different. After  all, this is when galaxies first started to grow, when they should have been vigorously  forming many of their stars. They should look like hyperactive kids. Those  types of galaxies are around back then, yet JWST has also seen much more developed,  “adult” galaxies. Some that look way too big, and way too ancient-looking for a universe  only a few hundred million years old.
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Over the past year or two, this mystery has made  the pop-sci rounds. That included some breathless speculation—like the idea that the entire  Big Bang model is wrong. If there are ancient galaxies 13 billion years ago, then how can the  universe be only 13 and a half billion years old?
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So far we haven’t weighed in on this conundrum.  Now many others have done a fantastic job laying it out and debunking some of the foolishness. Dr  Becky in particular was on top of the progress as new data came in from JWST. So, why should we  cover it now? First, a lot of you have asked for our take and it’s time to go on record. Second,  the evolution of this mystery has been quite an emotional rollercoaster, swinging from unsolvable  to solved, and now there’s new work that swings back in the direction of WTF. So let’s talk about  the current status of the early galaxy conundrum.
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And before that, let’s talk a  bit more about what we actually expect the early universe galaxies to look like.
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Galaxies pulled themselves together from tiny  density fluctuations in the very early universe that we see in the dappling of the cosmic  microwave background. The CMB reveals regions with tiny excesses of matter—hydrogen gas, but  more importantly dark matter which outweighs the gas by a factor of at least five. As dark matter  pulled itself together by gravity it pulled the gas in with it. And as that gas compacted,  the first stars were also born. These very early galaxies must have started small, but with  pretty crazy star formation due to the enormous abundance of gas at that time. As those galaxies  continued to grow, they collided and merged, and eventually built themselves up into  the mature galaxies that we see today.
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We think we understand this stuff pretty well  - or at least thought we did. Between the precise CMB measurements and our theoretical  understanding of gravity, star formation, etc., our computer simulations allow us  to explore the possible growth scenarios for galaxies. We can predict, for example,  that early galaxies should be forming stars like crazy due to the enormous amounts of raw  material—-hydrogen gas—that was around back then.
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One thing that should be even more robust as  a prediction is the size of dark matter halos.
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These are the giant pools of dark matter that  encompass all galaxies and hold them together.
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Because dark matter should not be  strongly effected by the complicated behavior of the gas and stars, we have  high confidence in our understanding of how those halos grew over time.  Or at least we thought we knew.
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One very clear prediction of this whole model  is that a lot of this halo growth should have happened in the first 10% of the universe’s age.  In that first 1.5 billion years since the big bang there shouldn’t have been essentially no very  large halos, and so no very large galaxies.
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And that’s what the theory and the simulations  say. But to check these we need powerful time machines— telescopes. Now as the telescopes got  bigger and our cameras got more sensitive we were finally able to probe early enough times to  properly test our models of halo growth. And this is where the problem started around 15-16 years  ago when our “high redshift galaxy surveys” - aka really far away galaxy surveys - finally  reached these distances we got some answers.
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And those surveys started seeing a few  cases of what looked like giant halos at earlier and earlier times. And also the hint  of overly red galaxies in the early universe.
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Galaxies that are actively forming  new stars should be bright at short wavelengths because they have lots of  giant, hot, short-lived stars. They are relatively blue in color compared  to older galaxies. And older galaxies that are no longer so actively forming  stars look much redder because these short-lived blue stars exploded already.
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Those early surveys didn't reveal anything crazy  yet—just a handful of cases where the galaxies looked too big and/or too evolved compared to  what was expected from our models. In 2018, Charles Steinhardt and team articulated this  emerging tension in their paper “the impossibly early galaxy problem”. But impossible  things are well, impossible. It’s right there in the name. So several not-impossible  explanations for these galaxies were devised.
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For one, we don’t see these overly-large dark  matter halos directly. We only see the starlight, and we use that starlight to infer the  mass of the stars and then the mass of halos that contain them. But that step requires  assumptions, and if any of those assumptions are wrong then perhaps we got the wrong halo  mass. And the redness that suggests an old stellar population could be due to other  things too, and there are several other issues with these inferences besides. I’ll  come back to possible solutions in a bit.
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But even if the galaxies observed in  these ground-based surveys were really too old looking and too big looking,  well we haven’t quite broken all of astrophysics and cosmology yet. If we  strain our models of galaxy formation, we can potentially speed up galaxy  evolution to show why these things exist by the time the universe is 10% of its  current age. What we’d really like to do is to look back even further in time to see  if we can find the time when these galaxies were themselves growing. And that’s what  we did with the James Webb Space Telescope.
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JWST was designed to push this early-galaxies  game to new extreme limits. It’s the largest telescope ever deployed to space, which means the  most powerful. It’s also designed to be sensitive to very long wavelengths of light—deep into the  infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
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The “mid-infrared” as we like to call it.  That’s important for these first galaxies because of the expansion of the universe. Their  light has been traveling to us for much of the age of the universe. Because these EM waves  traveled through expanding space, they were stretched out—their wavelengths lengthened. This  is cosmological redshift, and higher redshift means longer travel time and greater distance. For  the galaxies we’re interested in, this redshift converts visible and even ultraviolet light  into mid-infrared—which is why JWST is needed.
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The first efforts with JWST used similar methods  to our ground-based galaxy surveys. So maybe I give you a bit more detail on that. The first  thing you do in a galaxy survey is to take pics with different filters corresponding to  different wavelength bands and then you compare the amount of light in each filter—we call this  photometric imaging. We can learn a lot of stuff from the ratios of filter brightnesses— and so the  colors. We discover candidate galaxies this way, we make a crude estimate of the distance  because the color ratios suggest a redshift, we can constrain the stellar population—both  the number of stars and the distribution of different types—for example, the redder colors  mean an older population with few massive stars.
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So what did JWST find? Well first, it  confirmed the presence of overly massive and overly old-looking galaxies from the  earlier studies—and remember that was from a cosmic age of around 10%--a redshift  of 4. Now a critical advantage of JWST is that it’s sensitive enough to do proper  spectroscopy on these galaxies—it can measure their “spectrum”-- the amount of light as  a function of wavelength. These spectra confirmed that the redshifts are indeed very  high. They also confirmed that the redness of the spectra is due to highly evolved stellar  populations, rather than, say, there being a lot of dust in the galaxies, which can cause  similar reddening in photometric analyses.
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With these confirmations of old-looking early  galaxies, researchers more broadly really started to pay attention. The media started  to pick up on it when JWST pushed to greater distances and earlier times and kept finding these  things. Currently, the earliest candidate giant, evolved galaxy discovered by JWST is at  redshift 7.3, at just 5% of the universe’s age.
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Now it seems we have a real conflict  with our models of galaxy formation.
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Dark matter halos too large and stellar  populations too evolved for the short amount of time they had to develop. And this is about why  we started to hear some hysterical claims that the universe is twice as old as we thought, or that  the big bang model is completely overturned.
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It’s not. And it isn't. There’s just so much  independent corroboration of our model of an expanding 13 point something billion  year old universe. You can’t point to one admittedly intriguing discrepancy and  decide to throw the baby universe out with the bath water. There are much more parsimonious  explanations for our improbably early galaxies.
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Let’s look at one of the most compelling. Remember that when we calculate the masses of  these supposedly gigantic dark matter halos, we based them on the starlight that  we see, and  that requires an understanding of the relationship between these two things,  the starlight and the dark matter halo mass.
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And that involves assumptions. Here’s how that works. One assumption is that halo  mass is connected to the mass in stars,  and that “stellar mass” is connected  to the amount of light we see in those stars.
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But we don’t see the light from all of the  stars—typically the light we collect is dominated by the brightest stars in the galaxy. We then have  to decide on the relative numbers of the different types of stars so we can extrapolate from the  observer starlight to the mass of all stars, seen and unseen. And there's another assumption.  And, yes, from there we can get to the halo mass.
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Knowing the distribution of stellar masses  in a galaxy on the other side of the universe takes some guesswork to say the least. And  maybe the biggest unknown there is something called the initial mass function—the  IMF. It tells us the relative numbers of stars at different masses that form  when a burst of star formation happens.
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We typically use the IMF that has been measured  for the Milky Way galaxy, sometimes with various refinements. But we don’t know that stars  formed with similar mass distributions in the early universe. And they probably didn’t.  For example, when there’s less heavy elements around from generations of old stars, its easier  to make really gigantic stars because gas clouds don’t fragment as much when the collapse. That  would give what we call a “top-heavy” IMF— so more massive stars form in a given burst of star  formation relative to what happens in the Milky Way. And more bright, massive stars means that  these galaxies would be overly bright for a given halo mass. So if we’re determining halo mass  from the light of those massive stars then we over estimate halo mass. Such a “top-heavy” IMF  is probably the leading contender for explaining the apparent giantness of the dark matter  halos. And this may even solve the conundrum.
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But the mystery does stop here. A new  study just found exactly the opposite result of this. This study claims to have  identified a sample of galaxies that are what those “impossibly early” galaxies  became in this part of the universe.
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And because this sample is much closer,  we can detect the light of much fainter, lower-mass stars. And so figure out the initial  mass function down to much lower masses.
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And the result is bad. This study found  that the IMF is actually bottom-heavy in those galaxies. There are way more low mass  stars—little red dwarfs and whatnot—compared to  the Milky Way for example. And  definitely very bottom-heavy compared to what we think a top-heavy IMF might look  like. The top-heavy IMF that was supposed to solve the problem of the impossible galaxies.  And in fact, this bottom-heavy IMFworsens the problem. An excess of low-mass stars means  that when we convert galaxy light to stellar mass we underestimate that stellar mass, and  presumably underestimate it's dark matter halo mass. And that makes it even harder to figure  out how those things grew so fast so quick.
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OK, before we join our crazy uncle on the anti-Big  Bang conspiracy facebook group, some words of caution. We don’t really know whether this new  study really did successfully identify the modern counterparts of our impossible galaxies, and  the authors admit that, calling them “likely descendents”. We also don’t know what complicating  interactions these galaxies could have had in the intervening 13 billion years to muddle the  IMF. We also don’t know that a bottom-heavy IMF rules out an IMF that’s also top-heavy. In  other words, there could be an over-abundance of low mass stars AND of high mass stars all  compared to masses around that of the Sun. And it is plausible to assume an IMF like this that  would still bring down those early halo masses.
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There are similar challenges in explaining  the apparent redness of these early galaxies.
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The key here is that we need a way  to shut star formation down much more quickly than we thought likely. Perhaps  the leading contender is quite awesome—early quasars—supermassive black holes in the  hearts of these galaxies blasting out radiation and winds that heats up and  expels gas so that stars stop forming and the population can evolve quickly. We  know this sort of feedback from quasars happens, but we now need to understand why its  so extreme in the early universe. That involves very rapid growth of supermassive black holes—yet  another very real and very interesting problem.
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The most likely solution to all of this  is that we’re going to learn an enormous amount about the surprising processes  behind structure growth, star formation, black hole seeding and growth, and who  knows what else. And once we figure it out, the impossible early galaxies will become more  than just possible—they’ll become inevitable: a natural part of our updated  understanding of our early spacetime.
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Wortschatz und Sprechhinweise zu dieser Lektion

Diese Sprechübung auf Niveau C1 basiert auf dem Video „We Found Galaxies Too Old for the Universe“. Diese Wörter kommen am häufigsten vor: galaxies, star, mass, halo, universe. Dieses Video enthält 47 Sätze und 3028 Wörter zum Nachsprechen. Der gesprochene Teil dauert 19:42. Der Sprecher spricht in natürlichem Tempo, etwa 154 Wörter pro Minute, ähnlich wie im Alltagsgespräch. Nur 81 % der Wörter gehören zu den 3.000 häufigsten im Englischen, der Wortschatz ist also anspruchsvoll.

Wichtiger Wortschatz in diesem Video

Die 15 anspruchsvollsten Wörter aus dem Video, mit Aussprache und Bedeutung:

WortAusspracheBedeutung
telescope Substantiv/ˈtɛl.əˌskoʊp/Teleskop, Fernrohr
stellar Adjektiv/ˈstɛl.əɹ/stellar, Stern-
redshift Substantiv/ˈɹɛdˌʃɪft/Rotverschiebung
tab Substantiv/tæb/Reiter, Karteikartenreiter
starlight Substantiv/ˈstɑː(ɹ)laɪt/Sternenlicht
wavelength Substantiv/ˈweɪvˌlɛŋ(k)θ/Wellenlänge
evolve Verb/ɪˈvɑlv/entwickeln
overly Adverballzu, übermäßig
assumption Substantiv/əˈsʌm(p).ʃ(ə)n/Übernahme, Annahme
conundrum Substantiv/kəˈnʌn.dɹəm/Rätsel, Scherzfrage
merch Substantiv/mɝt͡ʃ/Fanartikel
redness SubstantivRöte
infrared Adjektiv/ˌɪnfɹəˈɹɛd/infrarot
geodesic Substantiv/ˌd͡ʒiː.əˈdɛs.ɪk/Geodäte
impossibly Adverb/ɪmˈpɒ.sɪb.li/unmöglich

Phrasal Verbs, die du hören wirst

WortAusspracheBedeutung
figure out Verbherausfinden
end up Verbsich herausstellen, am Ende irgendwo / etwas sein
go down Verbabsteigen, hinabsteigen
heat up Verberhitzen, aufheizen
look back Verbzurückschauen, zurückblicken
rule out Verbdurchstreichen
speed up Verb/spiːdˈʌp/beschleunigen
try out Verbausprobieren, probieren

Grammatik in diesem Video

Die Strukturen, die der Sprecher am häufigsten verwendet, mit den genauen Worten aus dem Video:

StrukturIm Video
Present Perfect Continuous have/has been + -ing – eine Handlung, die früher begann und noch andauerthas been traveling
Passiv be + Partizip Perfekt – wichtig ist, was geschieht, nicht wer es tutwere also born · was expected · was designed
Present Perfect have/has + Partizip Perfekt – eine vergangene Handlung, die jetzt noch wichtig istwe've also learned · has also seen · has made
Relativsätze who / which + Satz – eine Zusatzinformation über eine Person oder Sachespace, which means · galaxies, which can

Aussprache, auf die du achten solltest

Der Sprecher verwendet 30 Kurzformen und abgeschwächte Formen, zum Beispiel don't, we're, didn't. Sprich sie in der kurzen Form, so wie du sie hörst.

  • Die „th“-Laute: wavelength /ˈweɪvˌlɛŋ(k)θ/, theoretical /ˌθi.əˈɹɛt.ɪ.kəl/
  • Die Laute „sh“ und „zh“: redshift /ˈɹɛdˌʃɪft/, assumption /əˈsʌm(p).ʃ(ə)n/, simulation /ˌsɪm.jəˈleɪ.ʃn̩/, prediction /pɹɪˈdɪkʃən/, caution /ˈkɔːʃ(ə)n/
  • Lange Wörter – auf die Betonung achten: geodesic /ˌd͡ʒiː.əˈdɛs.ɪk/, impossibly /ɪmˈpɒ.sɪb.li/, photometric /ˌfoʊ.təˈmɛt.ɹɪk/, underestimate /ʌndɚˈɛs.tɪ.meɪt/, electromagnetic /ɪˌlɛk.tɹoʊ.mæɡˈnɛ.tɪk/

Laute, die Deutschsprachigen schwerfallen:

  • /w/ — mit runden Lippen, nicht wie das deutsche „w“ (/v/): wavelength /ˈweɪvˌlɛŋ(k)θ/, quasar /ˈkweɪ.zɑɹ/, wildly /ˈwaɪldli/, downward /ˈdaʊnwɚd/, microwave /ˈmaɪkɹoʊˌweɪv/
  • Stimmhafter Auslaut — /b/, /d/, /g/, /z/, /v/ am Wortende nicht verhärten: tab /tæb/, evolve /ɪˈvɑlv/, infrared /ˌɪnfɹəˈɹɛd/, devise /dɪˈvaɪz/, intrigue /ˈɪntɹiːɡ/
  • /æ/ — offener als „ä“: tab /tæb/, gigantic /d͡ʒaɪˈɡæntɪk/, fragment /ˈfɹæɡmənt/, electromagnetic /ɪˌlɛk.tɹoʊ.mæɡˈnɛ.tɪk/, calculate /ˈkælkjʊleɪt/

So übst du mit diesem Video

  1. Höre dir das ganze Video einmal an, ohne zu sprechen, und notiere die Wörter, die du nicht kennst.
  2. Beginne mit 0,75-facher Geschwindigkeit, sprich Satz für Satz nach und wechsle zur normalen Geschwindigkeit, sobald es leichtfällt.
  3. Nimm dich auf und vergleiche mit dem Original; achte dabei auf Wörter wie telescope, stellar, redshift.

Was ist die Shadowing-Technik?

Shadowing ist eine wissenschaftlich fundierte Sprachlerntechnik, die ursprünglich für die professionelle Dolmetscherausbildung entwickelt und durch den Polyglotten Dr. Alexander Arguelles populär gemacht wurde. Die Methode ist einfach aber wirkungsvoll: Du hörst englisches Audio von Muttersprachlern und wiederholst es sofort laut — wie ein Schatten, der dem Sprecher mit nur 1–2 Sekunden Verzögerung folgt. Anders als passives Hören oder Grammatikübungen zwingt Shadowing dein Gehirn und deine Mundmuskulatur, gleichzeitig echte Sprachmuster zu verarbeiten und zu reproduzieren. Studien zeigen, dass es Aussprachegenauigkeit, Intonation, Rhythmus, verbundene Sprache, Hörverständnis und Sprechflüssigkeit signifikant verbessert — was es zu einer der effektivsten Methoden für die IELTS Speaking-Vorbereitung und reale englische Kommunikation macht.

Shadowing-Technik: die vollständige Schritt-für-Schritt-Anleitung lesen →