New baby pictures of the universe, taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, show that galaxies started forming faster and earlier than expected.
Since astronomers started using JWST, some have claimed to have spotted galaxies from even earlier times, like 250 million years after the Big Bang. But those are more tentative observations.
"We feel very confident about these two, but less confident about the others," says Illingworth."There's certainly a lot of discussion going on." The two newly-seen galaxies are both much smaller than our home galaxy, the Milky Way, and one appears to be unexpectedly elongated.Because so many early, bright galaxies have been seen by JWST, astronomers are having to rethink their old ideas about the evolution of the universe.
"It's exciting for us, from a theoretical standpoint, that maybe there are some open questions about how these galaxies could have formed their stars so much earlier that we're able to detect large numbers of them," saysFinding galaxies like these, and building a greater understanding of how the universe evolved to be what it is today, is why astronomers spent decades and $10 billion dollars to design and launch JWST.
"We can see that we're really on track to realizing the dream of understanding galaxies at the earliest times," says Illingworth."The last few months have been exciting, but a huge amount remains in front of us to learn."
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