From Dr. Becky.
AD | Join me in reading Nautilus by heading to http://joinnautilus.com/drbecky where you can get 15% off a membership to Nautilus, perfect for any science enthusiast. | The James Webb Space Telescope, JWST, has been surprising us with new results about the early Universe that we can’t yet explain for the past few years now; from the little red dot galaxies, to the over massive galaxies, and finding galaxies with features like spiral arms earlier in the Universe than we ever thought they should exist. And this month was no exception, when a paper was published by Smethurst and collaborators on the Galaxy Zoo and CEERS teams claiming to have found featureless disc shaped galaxies way earlier in the Universe’s history than we ever thought possible. That’s right, we’re talking about my own research in this week’s video, and I’m so excited that it’s finally been published so that we can chat all about it…
Smethurst et al. (2025) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.21869
Bland-Hawthorn et al. (2023) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.05574
Bland-Hawthorn et al. (2024) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.06060
Feng et al. (2015) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/1504.06618
Ferreira et al. (2022) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.09428
Ferreira et al. (2023) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.01110
Fraser-McKelvie et al. (2018) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.04336
Fujii et al. (2011) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/1006.1228
Fujii et al. (2018) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.00058
Guo et al. (2023) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.08658
Kuhn et al. (2024) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.12389
Labbe et al. (2023) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.12446
Liang et al. (2024) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.04019
Simmons et al. (2017) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.03070
Walmsley et al. (2023) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.08414
Walmsley et al. (2025) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.15310
00:00 Introduction
02:25 What are featureless discs and why do we care about them?
06:44 How we found these featureless discs in JWST data
14:54 Are they truly are featureless discs?
16:53 What this means for how galaxies evolve in the Universe
19:11 Bloopers
Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV
Video edited by Martino Gasparrini: https://www.fiverr.com/mgs_editing
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👩🏽💻 I’m Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford (Christ Church). I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don’t know. If you’ve ever wondered about something in space and couldn’t find an answer online – you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars.
