(ORDO NEWS) — The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered six massive galaxies that formed shortly after the Big Bang. Scientists say these galaxies formed at a rate contrary to our current understanding of the universe.
Since commissioning last July, the Webb Telescope has peered into the far reaches of the universe, which also means it looks back in time.
The telescope found galaxies that formed 500-700 million years after the Big Bang. Webb’s near-infrared NIRCam instrument observed six galaxies in a little-known region of the sky.
Two of these galaxies were previously detected by the Hubble Space Telescope, but in these images they were so faint that they went unnoticed.
These six new candidate galaxies contain many more stars than scientists expected.
It is believed that there are about 100 billion stars in one galaxy. This would make it about the size of the Milky Way.
For this young galaxy to achieve the same growth in just 700 million years, it would have to grow about 20 times faster than the Milky Way, according to Ivo Labbe, a researcher at the Australian University of Technology Swinburne.
That such massive galaxies arose so soon after the Big Bang contradicts the current cosmological model, which represents the best scientific understanding of how the universe works.
“According to the theory, galaxies grow slowly from very small seeds,” Labbe said.
He noted that such galaxies should have been 10-100 times smaller, but their sizes are really off scale.
What could happen? One suspect is the mysterious dark matter that makes up a significant portion of the universe.
Although much about dark matter remains unknown, scientists believe it plays a key role in the formation of galaxies.
When dark matter condenses into a halo, it attracts gas from the surrounding universe, which in turn forms a galaxy and its stars, Labbe said.
But this process is expected to take a long time. In addition, Labbe noticed, there are not many clumps of dark matter in the early Universe.
David Elbaz, an astrophysicist at the French Atomic Energy Commission who was not involved in the study, says the newly discovered galaxies may indicate that things happened much faster in the early universe than previously thought, allowing stars to form much more efficiently.
This may be due to recent indications that the universe itself is expanding faster than we once thought.
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