Space telescope discovers massive galaxies near cosmic dawn

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) — Astronomers have discovered what appear to be massive galaxies that emerged within 600 million years of the Big Bang, suggesting that the early universe may have had a stellar accelerated path that gave birth to these “monsters.”

While the new James Webb Space Telescope has found even older galaxies dating back only 300 million years from the beginning of the universe, the size and maturity of these six apparent megagalaxies staggers scientists. They reported their findings on Wednesday.

Lead researcher Ivo Labbe at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia and his team expected to find small baby galaxies so close to the dawn of the universe, not these hulks.

“While most galaxies in this era are still small and only gradually increase in size over time,” he said in an email, “there are a few monsters that are rapidly reaching maturity. Why this is and how it will work is unknown.”

Each of the six objects weighs billions of times more than our Sun. In one of them, the combined weight of all its stars could be 100 billion times that of our Sun, according to scientists who published their findings in the journal Nature.

Labbe said he and his team didn’t think the results were real at first – that there can’t be galaxies as mature as our own Milky Way so early – and they still need to be confirmed. The objects seemed so big and bright that some of the team thought they had made a mistake.

“We were amazed, we didn’t believe it a bit,” Labbe said.

Joel Lezha of Pennsylvania State University, who took part in the study, calls them “the destroyers of the universe.”

“The discovery that the formation of massive galaxies began very early in the history of the universe turns what many of us thought was established science on its head,” Leah said in a statement. “It turns out that we have found something so unexpected that it actually creates problems for science. This casts doubt on the whole picture of early galaxy formation.”

These observations of galaxies were among the first data sets from the $10 billion Webb Telescope, launched just over a year ago. Webb by NASA and the European Space Agency is considered the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, approaching the 33rd anniversary of its launch.

Unlike Hubble, the larger, more powerful Webb can see through dust clouds with its infrared vision and discover previously unseen galaxies. Scientists hope to eventually observe the first stars and galaxies that formed after the creation of the universe 13.8 billion years ago.

Researchers are still waiting for official confirmation using sensitive spectroscopy while cautiously calling these candidates massive galaxies. Lezha said some of the objects might not be galaxies, but hidden supermassive black holes.

While some of them may turn out to be smaller, “there’s a good chance that at least some of them turn out to be” galactic giants, Labbe said. “Next year will show us.

One of Webb’s first lessons is to “let go of your expectations and be ready to be surprised,” he said.

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