Ancient galaxies that shouldn’t have existed discovered

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or Webb) has continued to change the way we view space since it began its mission last year. But the telescope’s latest discovery has left astronomers confused because Webb took pictures of galaxies that shouldn’t have existed.

The six galaxies discovered in the light of the current information we have are not supposed to be there, but they are there and no one can explain how they formed. These galaxies found are almost as large as the Milky Way and are filled with mature red stars. By analyzing the light from these galaxies, astronomers calculated how far they were, and therefore how old they were. Accordingly, galaxies were found to have formed only 500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang. These years may sound big on a human scale, but they can be expressed as the infancy of the universe.

They weren’t supposed to exist

But being nearly 13 billion years old isn’t what makes them weird. Scientists say they shouldn’t exist according to current cosmological theory because at that time galaxies shouldn’t have had enough matter to form as many stars as ours. Therefore, the observed galaxies should not exist at all.

In observations made with instruments such as Hubble, it was determined that galaxies formed in the early stages of the universe were small and bluish in color. Therefore, what Webb has shown contradicts our previous knowledge. Young stars generally shine blue, and their luminosity shifts to red as they age and run out of fuel. Therefore, distant galaxies are expected to be blue, not red (remember that it takes time for light to reach Earth, so when viewing telescopic images we are actually looking back in time and seeing distant objects in the past).

These galaxies could be something else

Joel Leja, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, said before astronomers begin rewriting their cosmology theory to explain how these galaxies came together so quickly after the Big Bang, they need to make sure it’s nothing more than the weird red dots they’re looking at. For example, stars in the early universe may emit light in exotic ways due to their lack of heavy elements, and perhaps we do not include them in our models.”

The fact that these six galaxies look old and large means they formed hundreds of stars each year shortly after the Big Bang. Our Milky Way, on the other hand, forms one to two new stars each year. The team wants to lift the veil of secrecy by making more observations.