The Webb Telescope Spots Six Galaxies That Shouldn ’ t Exist

It isn’t easy to build a galaxy. The universe is a good 13.8 billion years old and the earliest galaxies ever detected—spotted by the James Webb Space telescope last November—did not form until 350 million years after the Big Bang. Not only did that infant universe take its time bringing forth its first galactic masses, it also didn’t build very big ones once it got around to it. The first galaxies were often dwarf galaxies—containing perhaps 100 million stars—compared to the size of modern galaxies like our Milky Way, which is believed to contain a minimum of 100 billion stars. Early galaxies, so the rule goes, were pipsqueaks. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Or at least that’s what the rule used to be. According to a new paper published today in Nature, objects that are thought to be at least six galaxies dating back as far as 500 million years after the Big Bang have been discovered with populations of tens or even hundreds of billions of stars. The largest of the six is thought to have a collective mass one trillion times greater than our sun—or 10 times the size of the Milky Way. “It’s bananas,” said Erica Nelson, an assistant professor of astrophysics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a co-author of the paper, in a statement that accompanied its release. “You just don’t expect the early universe to be able to organize itself that quickly. These galaxies should not have h...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Space Source Type: news