The Phys Org website and other outlets have reported that new images released from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed galaxies with stellar bars at a time when the universe was a quarter of its present age. They are estimated to be about 11 billion years old.
The universe is estimated to be about 13.7 billion years old; Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, and the Sun is about 4.6 billion years old (and is considered to be about halfway through its lifetime).
A regular spiral galaxy has many arms extending from the globular center. A stellar bar spiral galaxy has just two arms, similar to the icon commonly used for hurricanes. The stellar bars themselves are elongated features of stars that stretch from the centers of galaxies into their outer disks.
When looking at such a galaxy head-on, it appears to be spinning as the spiral arms extend out around it. One would expect that material from the center is moving outward to the arms.
However, the way the stellar bars function flies in the face of commonly-accepted physics. They actually funnel gas and dust in towards the center, boosting star formation.
The fact that these star-forming galaxies were discovered in an epoch far younger than previously thought challenges current theoretical models.
Phys Org quoted Shardha Jogee, professor of astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin: “I took one look at these data, and I said, ‘We are dropping everything else!...The bars hardly visible in Hubble data just popped out in the JWST image, showing the tremendous power of JWST to see the underlying structure in galaxies,” she said, describing data from the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey (CEERS), led by UT Austin professor, Steven Finkelstein.
