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Webb Telescope's Discovery of Massive Early Galaxies Still Defies Prior Understanding of Universe (psu.edu) 75

Posted by EditorDavid from the stars-searched dept.
Pennsylvania State University has an announcement. "Six massive galaxies discovered in the early universe are upending what scientists previously understood about the origins of galaxies in the universe." "These objects are way more massiveâ than anyone expected," said Joel Leja, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, who modeled light from these galaxies. "We expected only to find tiny, young, baby galaxies at this point in time, but we've discovered galaxies as mature as our own in what was previously understood to be the dawn of the universe."

Using the first dataset released from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, the international team of scientists discovered objects as mature as the Milky Way when the universe was only 3% of its current age, about 500-700 million years after the Big Bang.... In a paper published February 22 in Nature, the researchers show evidence that the six galaxies are far more massive than anyone expected and call into question what scientists previously understood about galaxy formation at the very beginning of the universe. "The revelation that massive galaxy formation began extremely early in the history of the universe upends what many of us had thought was settled science," said Leja. "We've been informally calling these objects 'universe breakers' — and they have been living up to their name so far."

Leja explained that the galaxies the team discovered are so massive that they are in tension with 99% of models for cosmology. Accounting for such a high amount of mass would require either altering the models for cosmology or revising the scientific understanding of galaxy formation in the early universe — that galaxies started as small clouds of stars and dust that gradually grew larger over time. Either scenario requires a fundamental shift in our understanding of how the universe came to be, he added. "We looked into the very early universe for the first time and had no idea what we were going to find," Leja said. "It turns out we found something so unexpected it actually creates problems for science. It calls the whole picture of early galaxy formation into question."
"My first thought was we had made a mistake and we would just find it and move on with our lives," Leja says in the statement. "But we have yet to find that mistake, despite a lot of trying."

"While the data indicates they are likely galaxies, I think there is a real possibility that a few of these objects turn out to be obscured supermassive black holes. Regardless, the amount of mass we discovered means that the known mass in stars at this period of our universe is up to 100 times greater than we had previously thought. Even if we cut the sample in half, this is still an astounding change."

Phys.org got a more detailed explantion from one of the paper's co-authors: It took our home galaxy the entire life of the universe for all its stars to assemble. For this young galaxy to achieve the same growth in just 700 million years, it would have had to grow around 20 times faster than the Milky Way, said Labbe, a researcher at Australia's Swinburne University of Technology. For there to be such massive galaxies so soon after the Big Bang goes against the current cosmological model which represents science's best understanding of how the universe works. According to theory, galaxies grow slowly from very small beginnings at early times," Labbe said, adding that such galaxies were expected to be between 10 to 100 times smaller. But the size of these galaxies "really go off a cliff," he said....

The newly discovered galaxies could indicate that things sped up far faster in the early universe than previously thought, allowing stars to form "much more efficiently," said David Elbaz, an astrophysicist at the French Atomic Energy Commission not involved in the research. is could be linked to recent signs that the universe itself is expanding faster than we once believed, he added.

This subject sparks fierce debate among cosmologists, making this latest discovery "all the more exciting, because it is one more indication that the model is cracking," Elbaz said.
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Webb Telescope's Discovery of Massive Early Galaxies Still Defies Prior Understanding of Universe More

Webb Telescope's Discovery of Massive Early Galaxies Still Defies Prior Understanding of Universe

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  • Not problems (Score:5, Insightful)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Sunday February 26, 2023 @10:27PM (#63325640) Journal

    "It turns out we found something so unexpected it actually creates problems for science."

    Unexpected (true) data is the most exciting thing in science. It's definitely not a problem.

    • Steady state is the only thing that ever made any sense imo. This notion of "settled science" is an absurdity, physics is infinite and the big bang was an equally absurd model created by a priest to go "God did it" and drop further inquiry (not saying "God didn't do it," but even the "God did it" crowd took an absurd stance on that one - if you have an infinite omnipresent thing then it only makes sense that thing would do its thing at all times everywhere, so even with that as the core axiom it was an abs

      • This notion of "settled science" is an absurdity.

        The notion of "settled science" is not "nothing can ever change". "Settled science" means enough evidence exists where scientists do not spend their limited time, effort, and research grant money pursuing something that is settled. For example, chemistry researchers are not asking for millions of dollars trying to figure out what happens when you mix baking soda with acetic acid (children's volcano experiment) or physicists pondering how electricity works. Science always leaves room for new evidence but I s

        • That's not what "settled science" means. "Settled science" is a mechanism for maintaining status quo. There are legitimate plateaus as you've outlined, but any time someone says "the science is settled" or similar is a fool making an appeal to authority that not only doesn't exist, but that they are unqualified to speak on (typically for political reasons, be it personal opinion of themselves and their words or some grander scheme, they're equally unjustifiable in nature.) But you already knew that, the

          • There are legitimate plateaus as you've outlined, but any time someone says "the science is settled" or similar is a fool making an appeal to authority that not only doesn't exist, but that they are unqualified to speak on

            Can you cite one example?

            But you already knew that, the reason you reacted to that specific fragment of a much longer post in such depth shows that.

            You said settled science is an "absurdity" when it is a part of science. Scientists do not spend their redoing research into topics that are settled. No one is trying to make uranium out of baking soda. No one is mixing chemicals to make lead into gold.

            • Can you cite one example?

              Every single time it's ever been said without a single exception.

              You said settled science is an "absurdity" when it is a part of science. Scientists do not spend their redoing research into topics that are settled. No one is trying to make uranium out of baking soda. No one is mixing chemicals to make lead into gold.

              Both examples you cited are in fact bugs wrought by Human error, not features. Every time data changes there's a triage process that should take place in much greater depth than it currently does in the scientific community. Science is incapable of proofs, only falsifying things to narrow down the potential scope, this is a byproduct of that knowledge-gathering process. Each falsification is itself deeply context-limited, and that context i

              • Every single time it's ever been said without a single exception,

                So you are unwilling to cite one example then. Got it.

                Both examples you cited are in fact bugs wrought by Human error, not features.

                WTF are you talking about? Science is based on "settled science". Every new chemist and physicist does not have to recreate centuries of science.

                Every time data changes there's a triage process that should take place in much greater depth than it currently does in the scientific community. Science is incapable of proofs, only falsifying things to narrow down the potential scope, this is a byproduct of that knowledge-gathering process. Each falsification is itself deeply context-limited, and that context is what is always shifting.

                Again WTF are you talking about? Science is based on evidence. Settled science happens because there is a mountain of evidence. No one is talking about proofs.

                There is no instance of "settled science," in any specific field, which has ever been accurate and given enough time every single thing we think we know will change with footnotes growing to infinity. "Settled science" is just political bias seeping into science, it's not a real thing.

                I gave you an examples. Again every new chemist does not have to determine what happens when you mix baking soda with vinegar: The chemical reaction is "s

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      > Unexpected (true) data is the most exciting thing in science. It's definitely not a problem.

      It is a problem when the anti-science crowd uses such "failures" as evidence that "scientists are morons" who can't be trusted.

  • Why should we believe the Big Bang Theory, anyway?

    • Re:So is the universe much older than predicted? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Narcocide ( 102829 ) on Sunday February 26, 2023 @10:53PM (#63325674) Homepage

      The physics is correct. A few galaxies came through from the previous universe, that's all.

    • I think the biggest fallacy is assuming there was a beginning; instead it always was, is, and will be. Having a beginning implies there was a time when there was not a universe.

      -The universe is infinite. The gold is in this pot.

      • Re:So is the universe much older than predicted? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by quenda ( 644621 ) on Monday February 27, 2023 @01:06AM (#63325860)

        I think the biggest fallacy is assuming there was a beginning;

        Your first fallacy is to assume the Big Bang implies a beginning. At the simplest level, it is merely as far back as we can see.
        When we look back in space and time, we eventually reach a very hot, dense state. Known physics breaks down, and we cannot see further.
        Maybe your God is hiding there.

        Having a beginning implies there was a time when there was not a universe.

        That makes no sense. The Dunning Kruger effect is big with this one, he seems to think he knows what Time is. Not even Einstein thought that :-)

        • Having a beginning implies there was a time when there was not a universe.

          That makes no sense. The Dunning Kruger effect is big with this one, he seems to think he knows what Time is. Not even Einstein thought that :-)

          Since we're all scientists, we should at least acknowledge that this question about time is the most interesting question of all, even if it is also the most baffling. Was there a beginning of time? If there was a beginning, why and how was that so? If there was no beginning, what happened before the Big Bang? Is our notion of time the wrong notion? Compared to these questions, the other questions of the physics involved with cosmology are relatively uninteresting. It's sort of a cop-out to perfunctor

          • "It's sort of a cop-out to perfunctorily state that space and time at the time of the Big Bang are too hard for us to understand and therefore don't need to be questioned."

            I don't think the problem is that it is too hard for us to understand, it is that we do not have the data to chose between explanations, and, sadly, it may be that we can prove that we can never get that data.
            • This. We can argue all day long about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and we will not reach any conclusion. This is what makes science different from mere opinion: knowledge does not come from community consensus, or authority decisions, but hard data. Until we can devise some method to get data from the Big Bang moment, we can only speculate. But we will need *several* different ways to get data to reach some useful conclusion.

              But, while (mathematical) proofs of impossibility are a good h

          • Re:So is the universe much older than predicted? (Score:5, Interesting)

            by quenda ( 644621 ) on Monday February 27, 2023 @04:54AM (#63326162)

            Was there a beginning of time? If there was a beginning, why and how was that so?

            You'll have to start by defining "beginning". Our common-sense definitions are useless here
            Our current understanding of space and time is in Einstein's Special and General Relativity, where space and time are not independent, but aspects of one fabric.

            Any discussion of "beginning of time" before at least understanding SR, and spacetime diagrams, is comically like 4 year-olds discussing how to build a robot.

            We don't even know what causation is. Why do we remember the past but not the future? The basic laws of physics are symmetric in time. The answer is mumble ... entropy .. something ... :-)

            a cop-out to perfunctorily state that space and time at the time of the Big Bang are too hard for us to understand and therefore don't need to be questioned.

            Too hard for you and me. But there are people who have far greater understanding, and we can listen to them on Youtube, or read their text-books, to gain a glimmer of understanding. Check out PBS Spacetime.
             

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Tablizer ( 95088 )

              > Too hard for you and me. But there are people who have far greater understanding

              Our everyday experience is just not applicable to the edges of astrophysics and the sub-atomic world. Time, space, and position just don't behave like we are used to. All we have are funky math models to even try to guess what's going on.

              As far as the question of "God(s)", we indeed could be in a simulation, or a manufactured/manipulated universe, but that's not only hard to test, but likely that existing religions got most

          • we should at least acknowledge that this question about time is the most interesting question of all, even if it is also the most baffling.

            It's a really good question but I think questions about AI are more interesting, and in terms of biology, the nature of the DNA code are really intriguing. Whereas I feel knowing the answer to "what is time?" would merely be moderately interesting (unless it leads to time travel or something like that).

      • I think the biggest fallacy is assuming there was a beginning; instead it always was, is, and will be.

        So, what's north of the North Pole?
        In the very same sense, it makes no sense to discuss what happened "before the big bang."

        Sure you could fly off into space or in a chopper, but that doesn't mean you're going more north.

        George Lemaître's poetic description of the "first day" still holds: "un jour sans hier," "a day without yesterday".

        In that same sense, there's an overwhelming consensus that the

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        God must necessarily be eternal to have created time. The issue is that if you are willing to believe in a supernatural being that exists outside of time, why not just believe that the universe itself is supernatural and started spontaneously? Or created itself? Anything you can attribute to God can be attributed to the universe, providing a simpler explanation that is equally unsubstantiated by any evidence.

        • Consciousness is all which exists, reality is an interface for communication between subsets of the mind of God and will always mesh with what each portion of God's mind needs to communicate with the other parts. That's the whole basis of the "materialism is wrong" bit. The material isn't real, physics will always perfectly align with what's needed and it doesn't need to make sense (see: trying to reconcile relativity with quantum mechanics.) This is why the steady state model makes the most sense: God i

    • You have to understand that Scientific theories come about based on observation. As new data comes in assumptions need to changed to accommodate the new data. In 1927 when Georges Lemaitre, a Roman Catholic priest and Belgian physicist, the data he had about the universe was vastly simpler [wikipedia.org] then what we have today.

      Big Bang has numerous problems [wikipedia.org] -- it is a relic from the last century that will require it to be eventually discarded but as Max Planck famously said "Science advances one funeral at a time."

      --
      W

  • Maybe in the early universe, time (as in the motion of atoms) progressed much faster allowing these galaxies to form in a fraction of the time it would take just a billion years later after the universe had expanded.

    All that energy in such a young/compact universe may have behaved much differently than we understand.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I think you've nailed it! I smell a Nobel Prize!

    • Maybe time is slowing down.

    • Maybe in the early universe, time (as in the motion of atoms) progressed much faster allowing these galaxies to form in a fraction of the time it would take just a billion years later after the universe had expanded.

      Or perhaps for the religious folks: God clicked the "Skip Intro" button.

  • First question:Do the stars in these early galaxies have mature characteristics, such as elements higher than helium on the periodic table? I'm presuming that they don't. (Maybe even the Webb Telescope can't detect the composition of stars at that distance.) Have they detected any supernovae in these galaxies?

    Second question: There's a limit to how big a star can be. Is there a limit to how big a galaxy can be? The article said the Milky Way took a long time to grow this big. If these galaxy were so bi

    • Do the stars in these early galaxies have mature characteristics, such as elements higher than helium on the periodic table?

      They would need to do a spectrum image of the galaxies to determine the chemical makeup. They haven't done that yet, although they want to.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Tablizer ( 95088 )

        >> [Do they have "mature" heavier elements?]

        > need to do a spectrum image of the galaxies to determine the chemical makeup. They haven't done that yet, although they want to.

        I've read it's tricky because the light is so faint, but theoretically possible by "stacking" multiple takes at different angles. This is gonna be interesting. If those galaxies to have heavier elements, astrophysics will be flipped.

        I'm so glad the Webb scope works. It's so complex that Murphy's Law lurked all around it.

  • All it says is that there was some mechanism early on that caused some big galaxies to form. Anything that formed that far away/long ago resulted in things we see now that are closer and more recent in time.

    I'm thinking they evolved into the dead elliptical galaxies we see today. But it is very interesting that large structures were present so long ago.

    • All it says is that there was some mechanism early on that caused some big galaxies to form.

      I'm actually going to assume that the astronomers are correct on this topic.

      • But that is what the astronomers said.

        "Six massive galaxies discovered in the early universe", except that they might be "obscured supermassive black holes".

    • There is a decades-old theory that the big-bang was regional such that older galaxies were around and survived it. The theory was mostly ignored because of lack of evidence, but perhaps should be brushed off.

      One variation is that our universe was created by multiple big-bangs which tapered off over time. Two high-dimension "sheets" collided, triggering bang-lets, and have since drifted apart.

  • A faulty stench coil, some cheese on the lens - who knows?

  • Are we sure that redshift is caused by velocity, and not that the universe is losing mass?

    Wouldn't explain why the "early" universe is so dense/large. (It started off as uniform/infinite.)

    • Maybe redshift is a function of distance instead of velocity. I.e. the further a galaxy is away from us, the further the light is redshifted.
    • The observable universe could be, if it's expanding fast enough that the oldest, most distant structures are effectively moving away at faster than light, or at least did for a time early on.

  • Whew! (Score:3)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Monday February 27, 2023 @04:59AM (#63326174)

    I was going to say, "Pics or it didn't happen," but TFA has pics, so I guess the Universe happened. :-)

  • Faster render speed. We are dealing with a limited processor Time 1.0

  • Here we have clear evidence that our "current" theories are wrong, yet all the comments are littered with people clinging to beliefs that are clearly wrong. Your theory no longer fits the facts, we no longer have to suffer your stupidity of attempting to explain things you clearly have no comprehension of.

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