New results from the James Webb Space Telescope challenge prevailing models of the early universe.
Just over a year after its historic launch, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is challenging astronomers’ expectations of the early universe and showing that massive galaxies likely formed much earlier than predicted.
The Hubble Space Telescope had already spotted all the different types of galaxies as far back as 11 billion years ago, suggesting that their formation had occurred even earlier, she added. Some researchers thought that JWST might finally glimpse these early stages of galaxy formation because the telescope sees further back in cosmic history than Hubble, Kartaltepe said.
The oldest galaxies in the universe?Another puzzling view of the early universe came from astronomer Haojing Yan of the University of Missouri. He and his colleagues looked at one of JWST’s first snapshots — a field of stars, galaxies and galactic clusters known as SMACS 0723 — and pinpointed some of the oldest galaxies ever observed.
Yan declined to speculate what might have caused galaxies to form much earlier than predicted in the universe, but he said that it is now up to theorists to come up with plausible explanations for such observations. His team’s work appeared in the Astrophysical Journal in December.
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