Posted by Heba El-Sayed
Sunday, February 26, 2023 04:02 PM
Telescope continues James Webb The alien has raised eyebrows, and has recently been used to discover some very ancient galaxies that have astonished astronomers. The candidate galaxies are much larger than anyone expected, challenging assumptions about the early universe.
An international team of astronomers discovered six potential galaxies in a region of space close to the Big Dipper constellation just 500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was still in its infancy, according to Digitartlends.
“These objects are much more massive than anyone expected,” said one of the researchers, Joel Lega of Penn State. “We only expected to find young, young galaxies at this point in time, but we did find mature galaxies like our own in what was previously understood to be the dawn of the universe.”
The galaxies appear to contain nearly as many stars as our modern Milky Way but are much more compact.
The researchers stress that they need more data to confirm whether these galaxies are certainly as old as they seem, but if they are, they could have a profound impact on the way we understand the early universe.
“You just wouldn’t expect the early universe to be able to organize itself so quickly,” said Erica Nelson of CU Boulder, another researcher. “There shouldn’t have been time for these galaxies to form.”
Some of the objects are likely to be black holes or supermassive quasars, but researchers believe they are more likely to be galaxies.
“If one of these galaxies is real, it would push the boundaries of our understanding of cosmology,” Nelson said.
The problem is that current models of cosmology assume that early galaxies must have been very young, only getting bigger over a long period of time.
“We looked at the very early universe for the first time and had no idea what we were going to find,” Lega said. “It turns out that we have found something so unexpected that it creates problems for science. It calls into question the whole picture of early galaxy formation.”
