A series of “impossible” galaxies spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in 2023 may finally have an explanation, thanks to a study published in October.
The JWST captured images of ancient galaxies that theoretically shouldn’t exist. An international team believed the galaxies were created around 500 million to 700 million years after the Big Bang, which defied all prior understanding of how galaxies form and spew out stars.
“We had specific expectations for the type of galaxies that live in the early universe: they are young and small,” one researcher wrote at the time. “Previous studies of the early universe with Hubble and other instruments tend to find small, blue, baby galaxies at early times: objects which have just recently formed out of the primordial cosmic soup and are themselves building their early stars and structures.”
Scientists Stunned By What They’re Seeing In New Images Of Deep Spacehttps://t.co/rM38FhoXSb
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) July 13, 2022
But a study published on October 3 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters used supercomputer simulations to suggest these “massive” galaxies are actually just unusually bright, and our initial interpretation of them was incorrect. (RELATED: Ingredients For Life Discovered In Far Reaches Of Space)
While the exact age of the galaxies remains unknown, researchers now believe “that galaxies have no problem forming this brightness by cosmic dawn.” That brightness is dictated by how many stars are able to form in a galaxy, rather than the mass of that galaxy, per the study.