Last July, the Webb Telescope’s high-resolution images confronted scientists with a profound anomaly. It has taken seven months to process the results and to pinch their arms. Joel Leja, a co-author of yesterday’s Nature magazine article, “A population of red candidate massive galaxies ~600 Myr after the Big Bang,” stated: “We expected only to find tiny, young, baby galaxies at this point in time, but we’ve discovered galaxies as mature as our own in what was previously understood to be the dawn of the universe. The revelation that massive galaxy formation began extremely early in the history of the universe upends what many of us had thought was settled science. We’ve been informally calling these objects ‘universe breakers’ — and they have been living up to their name so far.”
The scientists, on the presumption of a world originating in a “Big Bang” approximately 13.8 billion years ago, were examining data from six massive galaxies that evidently existed 13.1-13.3 billion years ago. As part of that model, they expected to see small, not-very-dense galaxies, forming from small clouds of stars and dust that slowly accumulated. However, Leja explained, these “objects are way more massive than anyone expected,” so massive that they easily wipe away the various computer models’ projections. “We looked into the very early universe for the first time and had no idea what we were going to find,” Leja said. “It turns out we found something so unexpected it actually creates problems for science. It calls the whole picture of early galaxy formation into question.”
“When we got the data, everyone just started diving in, and these massive things popped out really fast,” Leja said. “We started doing the modeling and tried to figure out what they were, because they were so big and bright. My first thought was we had made a mistake and we would just find it and move on with our lives. But we have yet to find that mistake, despite a lot of trying.”
