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Webb Finds Early Galaxies Weren't Too Big for Their Britches After All

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August 26, 2024 10:00AM (EDT)Release ID: 2024-134
Hundreds of small galaxies against the black background of space. Several white spiral galaxies are near image center. Most of the galaxies are various shades of orange and red, and many are too tiny to discern a shape. A handful of foreground stars show Webb's six diffraction spikes.

Summary

It got called the crisis in cosmology. But now astronomers can explain some surprising recent discoveries.

Not long after the James Webb Space Telescope began science operations in July 2022, breathless headlines proclaimed that observations of distant galaxies were “breaking theories of cosmic evolution.” Astronomers had found galaxies that appeared much brighter than expected. If all of that light came from stars, then those galaxies would have formed so many stars, so quickly, that the leading theory for the universe’s formation and evolution could not explain them.

New research finds that some of those early galaxies are in fact much less massive than they first appeared. Much of their light came, not from stars, but from a hot accretion disk surrounding a supermassive black hole.

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Full Article

When astronomers got their first glimpses of galaxies in the early universe from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, they were expecting to find galactic pipsqueaks, but instead they found what appeared to be a bevy of Olympic bodybuilders. Some galaxies appeared to have grown so massive, so quickly, that simulations couldn’t account for them. Some researchers suggested this meant that something might be wrong with the theory that explains what the universe is made of and how it has evolved since the big bang, known as the standard model of cosmology. According to a new study in the Astronomical ...

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