Six galaxies challenge what we have known so far

The impressive discoveries made by NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope include all six new galaxies about 500 to 700 million years old after the Big Bang. [NASA via A.P.]

When I started, about a year ago, I bragged about it NASAthe Webb Space Telescope The international scientific community had far outstripped its famous predecessor, the Hubble telescope, and was eager to make important discoveries from hitherto inaccessible neighborhoods. being.

It all started with a group of very bright, red dots that NASA analysts spotted in some of the first images Webb sent them. After careful analysis, researchers from the USA, Australia, Denmark and Spain concluded that these are most likely six galaxies with as many stars as ours, and they are very large and very compact.

What makes the discovery so unexpected is the age of the galaxies involved – about 500 to 700 million years after the ‘big bang’ that supposedly gave rise to the birth of the universe. Given that said explosion was set 13.8 billion years ago, the Webb galaxies are babies, but nonetheless they appear mature, with a star count that does not justify its age.

Six young galaxies with surprisingly early growth have been discovered.

“That’s crazy. One wouldn’t expect the early universe to self-organize so quickly,” said Erica Nelson, an associate professor from Colorado, commenting on the research team’s publication in the journal Nature. “Oh, these galaxies are strange creatures. If we compare our galaxy with a mature middle-aged man, 1.75 meters tall and weighing 70 kilograms, then these are small one-year-old galaxies weighing about 60 kilograms and only three centimeters in length. The universe is starting to freak out, ”comments Australian astrophysicist Ivo Lambi, one of the authors of the publication. If the results of his group are verified, the international scientific community will have to change the established cosmological standards, or the prevailing theories about the birth of stars and galaxies.

The head of the research team, Joel Lisa from the University of Pennsylvania, does not exclude the possibility that some of the detected objects may not be galaxies after all, but something else – huge black holes or strange quasars. In any case, the amount of mass detected by researchers for the early period of the universe is 10 to 100 times greater than that predicted by current models, which dramatically changes our picture of the evolution of the universe. The James Webb Space Telescope is named after the former US Undersecretary of State, who served as NASA Administrator during the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies. It operates in the infrared part of the spectrum, which allows it to penetrate cosmic dust and distinguish between previously unseen stars, while having the ability to “see” far in time, very close to the Big Bang.