The James Webb Space Telescope has made a discovery that could fundamentally rewrite our theories about the universe.
They found many huge and advanced galaxies, although they formed only 500-700 million years after the Big Bang.
Based on current models of cosmology, these objects should not exist, and there is no explanation for their evolution yet.
The discovery indicates that a key step or two has been missed in understanding the evolution of the universe.
We have never observed such massive galaxies so early after the Big Bang. The six galaxies just discovered are more than 12 billion years old, formed only 500-700 million years after the Big Bang, and can reach 100 billion times the mass of our sun. This is too large to be found in current models. This discovery could change our understanding of the formation of the first galaxies in our universe.” — Explanation in the journal Nature Stady Significance of Ivo Labbé, Fellow of Swinburne University of Technology in Austria.
The objects were discovered during early observations by the James Webb Space Telescope. The powerful space telescope surveys the universe in the infrared range, ideal for picking out the light that traveled billions of years to reach us from the early universe.
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According to our cosmological models, the universe looked very different in the early period. First, the hot particles from the Big Bang had to cool down enough to form atoms and fill a given volume primarily with hydrogen and helium. The first stars and galaxies began to form from this gas, about 150 million years after the Big Bang.
However, the mass of galaxies that exist now is very large, and does not fit into the early universe.
Not so much that scientists first suspected a measurement error. The data was carefully checked and it was found that the possibility of error was excluded.
Thus, only two things are possible:
Or our ideas about cosmology or the early universe are flawed.
Either way, everything we think about the universe can change radically.
Maybe we don’t even see galaxies?
Of course, it cannot be ruled out that the objects are actually not galaxies, but other types of formations. For example, there may be supermassive black holes that have not yet been discovered. Even in this case, the professionals will not have an easy task, because the early appearance of these things will also need further explanations.
The researchers will investigate the observed galaxies to reveal their nature, distance and size in more detail, but they also want to get information about their chemical composition.
