What are the enormous 'universe breaker' galaxies discovered by NASA's James Webb telescope?

Finally, astronomers got a peek at how the universe looked more than 13 billion years ago.

In fact, these discoveries could revolutionise all we know about the universe’s creation.

According to CNN, scientists received their first glance at cosmic history when the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope were released in July 2022.

These pictures showed what the universe looked like when it was billions of light-years away.

The researchers anticipated possibly spotting “tiny, young, baby galaxies.”

But what they actually discovered was much more significant – six huge galaxies with an estimated age of 13.1 billion years, which appeared to be the same age as the Milky Way at the time.

The findings were published on Wednesday in the journal titled Nature.

Let’s take a closer look at what these galaxies are and what these discoveries could mean for science.

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More massive than expected

The space observatory discovered the six massive galaxies that existed between 500 million and 700 million years after the big bang that formed the universe. The revelation is fundamentally upending accepted views regarding the creation of galaxies, reported CNN.

‘We just discovered the impossible’ – Images from the powerful new #JWST show a small red dot that will shake up our understanding of how galaxies formed after the Big Bang. Associate Professor Ivo Labbe has published the results in @Nature ➡️ https://t.co/2gBQtsRNiy pic.twitter.com/5zFlv6UWC9

— Swinburne University of Technology (@Swinburne) February 23, 2023

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Joel Leja, study co-author and assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University, said in a statement, “These objects are way more massive than anyone expected. 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.”

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Looking into early galaxies

Ivo Labbe, the lead author of the study, said they started realising they were onto something barely a week after the telescope images were released.

According to CNN, the $10 billion (~ Rs 82,735 crore) Webb telescope, launched just over a year ago by NASA and the European Space Agency, is considered the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, coming up on the 33rd anniversary of its launch.

The powerful Webb telescope is capable of detecting the dim light from old stars and galaxies while seeing the universe in infrared light, which is imperceptible to the human eye.

The observatory can literally look back in time to around 13.5 billion years ago by gazing into the faraway universe. The universe is estimated to be 13.7 billion years old by scientists.

As soon as the Webb data and the telescope’s initial high-resolution photos were made available in July, Leja and his colleagues started studying them.

The research team was astonished to find the galaxies. Initially, they even believed that they had misinterpreted the data since the galaxies looked like huge points of light.

Leja said, “When we got the data, everyone just started diving in and these massive things popped out really fast. We started doing the modelling and tried to figure out what they were, because they were so big and bright. My first thought was we had made a mistake and we would just find it and move on with our lives. But we have yet to find that mistake, despite a lot of trying.”

So, what next?

The astronomer noted that capturing a spectrum image of the galaxies, which entails splitting light into multiple wavelengths to define various elements and determine the true distance of the galaxies, is one technique to ascertain why the galaxies developed so swiftly.

“A spectrum will immediately tell us whether or not these things are real. It will show us how big they are, how far away they are. What’s funny is we have all these things we hope to learn from James Webb and this was nowhere near the top of the list. We’ve found something we never thought to ask the universe — and it happened way faster than I thought, but here we are,” Leja added.

There is also a possibility that the galaxies could be something else.

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Prior understanding of the universe defied

Joel Leja explained in a statement, “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. We’ve been informally calling these objects ‘universe breakers’ — and they have been living up to their name so far. “

Scientists need to reconsider how galaxies started and evolved since the galaxies are so enormous that they contradict 99 per cent of models describing early galaxies in the universe. According to the current theory, galaxies started out as small clouds of stars and dust that developed through time.

“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.”

The dark ages are thought to have occurred when the cosmos spent a few hundred million years cooling down enough for gas to consolidate and collapse into the first stars and galaxies following a period of rapid expansion, reported The Guardian.

Dr Emma Chapman, an astrophysicist at the University of Nottingham who was not involved in the most recent study, told The Guardian that the discovery of such massive galaxies so soon after the big bang “suggests that the dark ages may not have been so dark after all and that the universe may have been awash with star formation far earlier than we thought."

With inputs from agencies

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