The James Webb Telescope Found Six Galaxies That May be Too Hefty for Their Age
upstart writes:
The James Webb telescope found six galaxies that may be too hefty for their age:
[...] Six galaxies that formed in the universe's first 700 million years seem to be up to 100 times more massive than standard cosmological theories predict, astronomer Ivo Labbe and colleagues report February 22 in Nature. "Adding up the stars in those galaxies, it would exceed the total amount of mass available in the universe at that time," says Labbe, of the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. "So you know that something is afoot."
[...] Measuring the amount of light each object emits in various wavelengths can give astronomers an idea of how far away each galaxy is, and how many stars it must have to emit all that light. Six of the objects that Nelson, Labbe and colleagues identified look like their light comes from no later than about 700 million years after the Big Bang. Those galaxies appear to hold up to 10 billion times the mass of our sun in stars. One of them might contain the mass of 100 billion suns.
"You shouldn't have had time to make things that have as many stars as the Milky Way that fast," Nelson says. Our galaxy contains about 60 billion suns' worth of stars - and it's had more than 13 billion years to grow them. "It's just crazy that these things seem to exist."
In the standard theories of cosmology, matter in the universe clumped together slowly, with small structures gradually merging to form larger ones. "If there are all these massive galaxies at early times, that's just not happening," Nelson says.
One possible explanation is that there's another, unknown way to form galaxies, Labbe says. "It seems like there's a channel that's a fast track, and the fast track creates monsters."
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