The James Webb Space Telescope Found Galaxies in Deep Space That Shouldn’t Exist

A little under a year and half after its launch, the telescope has started sending back images that are flabbergasting to astrophysicists and cosmologists.

Scientists never expected this. Joel Leja, an astrophysicist, has noted that the James Webb Telescope “discovered galaxies as mature as our own in what was previously understood to be the dawn of the universe.”

This long-held understanding has been completely flipped on its head by the new images coming back to Earth. These images show early galaxies with possibly hundred of billions of stars, and one appears to be around ten times the size of the Milky Way.

Scientists believe that our galaxy took approximately 5 billion years to completely form. So of course, scientists reviewing these new findings are stunned. “It’s bananas,” commented Erica Nelson, an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado, Boulder who co-authored the paper that brought these findings to the scientific community.

The Hubble Space Telescope observed nothing unusual in its scan of this region. However, the Hubble primarily images in the visible spectrum. The Webb telescope, on the other hand, operates in the infrared spectrum, allowing it to bring a completely new view of this once-mapped area of space.

This ability to capture and redirect infrared light to instruments on Earth allows the Webb telescope a unique advantage. It can observe celestial bodies that are too cool or faint for the visible spectrum. Therefore, it can image very old stars, nebulae, and the like.

Leja says that this “revelation that massive galaxy formation began extremely early in the history of the universe upends what many of us had thought was settled science.”

With the entire formation of the universe being called into question, this is an example of how the Webb telescope may begin to rewrite science books.

This is only a first batch of images, so more investigations need to be conducted. For instance, the initial estimates of these galaxies’ sizes might be an illusion.

Gravitational lensing means that very distant light in space can be bent by the gravitational pull of celestial bodies. This creates an illusion which can make distant images appear much larger than they are.

This possibility was dismissed by scientists fairly fast. Through very close analysis of the images, they were able to confirm that there were no celestial bodies near enough to the galaxies for this phenomenon to take place.

These galaxies cannot coexist with almost all of present cosmological knowledge, so thorough and repeated studies must take place. We’ll see how much the Webb telescope continues to disrupt our current models in the future.