The Big Bang was since its inception a very implausible theory about the universe! What came before the Big Bang and other questions?
Maybe the new, superior James Webb Space Telescope will enlighten us! Was the Big Bang a mirage?
Caveat: These appear to be very preliminary research results!
Keep in mind: Science is never settled! E.g. yesterday I posted here about increasing questions about space-time continuum/framework.
As I blogged here a few days ago, researchers also discovered that massive black holes appear to have unexpectedly existed from the very beginning of the universe.
"... The study's lead author ... explained how shocked he was when he realized what the images meant.
"Little did I know that among the pictures is a small red dot that will shake up our understanding of how the first galaxies formed after the Big Bang," ...
"I run the analysis software on the little pinprick and it spits out two numbers: distance 13.1 billion light years, mass 100 billion stars, and I nearly spit out my coffee," he continued. "We just discovered the impossible. Impossibly early, impossibly massive galaxies."
In addition to the "pinprick" galaxy, the next day they discovered five other possible galaxies exhibiting the same unexpected qualities.
The "massive galaxies" were documented as they were only 700 million years from the beginning of the universe, which is believed to be a spry 13.8 billion years old.
"These objects are way more massive than anyone expected," ,,, "We've discovered galaxies as mature as our own in what was previously understood to be the dawn of the universe." ...
“We looked into the very early universe for the first time and had no idea what we were going to find,” Leja explained. “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.”"
From the abstract:
"Galaxies with stellar masses as high as ~ 1011 solar masses have been identified out to redshifts z ~ 6, approximately one billion years after the Big Bang. It has been difficult to find massive galaxies at even earlier times, as the Balmer break region, which is needed for accurate mass estimates, is redshifted to wavelengths beyond 2.5 μm. Here we make use of the 1-5 μm coverage of the JWST early release observations to search for intrinsically red galaxies in the first ≈ 750 million years of cosmic history. In the survey area, we find six candidate massive galaxies (stellar mass > 1010 solar masses) at 7.4 ≤ z ≤ 9.1, 500–700 Myr after the Big Bang, including one galaxy with a possible stellar mass of ~1011 solar masses. If verified with spectroscopy, the stellar mass density in massive galaxies would be much higher than anticipated from previous studies based on rest-frame ultraviolet-selected samples."
Did the James Webb Space Telescope just redefine how galaxies are created? Astronomers found something so unexpected it actually creates problems for science. The discovery of six massive galaxies by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) challenges the conventional wisdom among astronomers regarding the cosmic web’s origins.
A population of red candidate massive galaxies ~600 Myr after the Big Bang (open access, preprint, recently published in journal Nature)
Images of six candidate massive galaxies, seen 500-800 million years after the Big Bang. One of the sources (bottom left) could contain as many stars as our present-day Milky Way, but is 30 times more compact.
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