Challenging science: the galaxies photographed by James Webb (Photo: NASA, ESA, CSA, I. Labbe (Swinburne University of Technology)
No one expected them and yet they are here.
More precisely - name: Galaxies as large as our Milky Way, and full of mature stars are seen scattered in deep space images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, during its initial observations, and they are giving astronomers headaches.
The galaxies, described in a new study published Tuesday based on the new Space Telescope's first batch of publications, appear as distant red dots even to the state-of-the-art telescope.
But from analyzing the emitted light, the astronomers estimate that these are very old galaxies: those that formed only about half a million to 700,000 years after the Big Bang.
Ancient galaxies whose age is close to the beginning of the universe and its "dark age" (the first 400,000 years or so), are not rare.
What does not add up is the extraordinary size of the ancient galaxies, and the age of the stars in them, which are too old - these discoveries contradict the existing theories about the beginning of the universe, and do not match the observations made by Webb's predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope.
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While young stars glow blue, aging stars become redder as they burn and cool.
The accepted assumption is that galaxies from the beginning of the universe were relatively small, and scientists did not expect to discover old stars in them.
The present observations break these assumptions.
At the moment the scientists are re-examining the findings, but if they are indeed galaxies - this will require a rethinking of quite a few existing theories.
"We looked into the early days of the universe for the first time, and we didn't know what we were going to find," Joel Leha, an astronomer and astrophysicist at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the authors of the study, said in a press release.
"It turns out that we found something so unexpected that it creates problems for existing science. This calls into question the way in which the first galaxies were formed."
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