A recent discovery by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) confirmed that luminous, very red objects previously detected in the early universe upend conventional thinking about the origins and evolution of galaxies and their supermassive black holes.
A recent discovery by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope confirmed that luminous, very red objects previously detected in the early universe upend conventional thinking about the origins and evolution of galaxies and their supermassive black holes .
"We have confirmed that these appear to be packed with ancient stars -- hundreds of millions of years old -- in a universe that is only 600-800 million years old. Remarkably, these objects hold the record for the earliest signatures of old starlight," said Bingjie Wang, a postdoctoral scholar at Penn State and lead author on the paper."It was totally unexpected to find old stars in a very young universe.
"It's very confusing," said Joel Leja, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State and co-author on both papers."You can make this uncomfortably fit in our current model of the universe, but only if we evoke some exotic, insanely rapid formation at the beginning of time. This is, without a doubt, the most peculiar and interesting set of objects I've seen in my career.
Aside from their unexplainable mass and age, if part of the light is indeed from supermassive black holes, then they also aren't normal supermassive black holes. They produce far more ultraviolet photons than expected, and similar objects studied with other instruments lack the characteristic signatures of supermassive black holes, such as hot dust and bright X-ray emission. But maybe the most surprising thing, the researchers said, is how massive they seem to be.
"These early galaxies would be so dense with stars -- stars that must have formed in a way we've never seen, under conditions we would never expect during a period in which we'd never expect to see them," Leja said."And for whatever reason, the universe stopped making objects like these after just a couple of billion years. They are unique to the early universe."
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