[imagesource: Flickr]
While we continue to be swamped by our (relatively) small human problems, the James Webb Space Telescope has been peering into the deepest cosmos and revealing unprecedented insights about the early universe.
Most recently, while scanning a region of the cosmos near the Big Dipper (pictured above), a group of astronomers identified something that has pretty much blown their minds.
“It’s bananas,” Erica Nelson, an astrophysicist at CU Boulder who’s been working on the new discovery, said in a statement via Mashable.
It turns out, deep in the Big Dipper are six faint objects that appear to be well over 13 billion years old, suspected to be ancient galaxies, that are remarkably humongous.
Scientists expect such early collections of stars and swirling matter to be relatively small since galaxies back then didn’t have much time to form or grow, but the research points in the other direction:
It’s bananas because the objects, which are “red and bright” in the Webb observations, might host billions of stars (and many more planets), similar to our Milky Way galaxy. These galaxies formed some 500 to 700 million years after the universe was created during the Big Bang, and at such a time there simply shouldn’t have been enough matter around to create fantastic bursts of stars and solar systems, Nelson explained.
The fuzzy red dots are supposed to be the extremely distant galaxies in question:
‘We just discovered the impossible’ – Images from the powerful new #JWST show a small red dot that will shake up our understanding of how galaxies formed after the Big Bang. Associate Professor Ivo Labbe has published the results in @Nature ➡️ https://t.co/2gBQtsRNiy pic.twitter.com/5zFlv6UWC9
— Swinburne University of Technology (@Swinburne) February 23, 2023
They appear red because the universe is expanding, which makes the light stretch and ultimately shift into longer, redder wavelengths.
Since the research on these red masses has only just begun, there is a chance that they are a different kind of primordial object.
There is talk of them possibly being quasars, which is an intensely hot, energetic bunch of matter spinning around a black hole and emitting tremendous amounts of light into space.
Ancient galaxies have been spotted before, including ones formed just 350 million years after the Big Bang, but they’re smaller and therefore make more sense in the great scheme of things.
“If even one of these galaxies is real, it will push against the limits of our understanding of cosmology,” Nelson noted.
How exciting.
[source:mashable]
