Webb spots massive galaxies in the early universe that should not exist at that time
The uncertainty of science: Astronomers using the Webb Space Telescope have identified six galaxies that are far too massive and evolved to have formed so quickly after the Big Bang.
The research, published today in Nature, could upend our model of the Universe and force a drastic rethink of how the first galaxies formed after the Big Bang. “We’ve never observed galaxies of this colossal size, this early on after the Big Bang,” says lead researcher Associate Professor Ivo Labbé from Swinburne University of Technology.
“The six galaxies we found are more than 12 billion years old, only 500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang, reaching sizes up to 100 billion times the mass of our sun. This is too big to even exist within current models.
You can read the paper here [pdf]. The “current models” Labbé is referring to are all the present theories and data that say the Big Bang occurred 13.7 billion years ago. These galaxies, however, found less than a billion years after that event, would have needed 12 billion years to have accumulated their mass.
If confirmed, these galaxies essentially tell us that the Big Bang is wrong, or very very VERY incomplete, and that all the data found that dates its occurrence 13.7 billion years ago, based on the Hubble constant, must be reanalyzed.
It is also possible these galaxies are actually not galaxies, but a new kind of supermassive black hole able to form very quickly. Expect many scientists who are heavily invested in the Big Bang to push for this explanation. It might be true, but their biases are true also, which means that Webb is presenting us with new data that calls for strong skepticism of all conclusions, across the board.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
The uncertainty of science: Astronomers using the Webb Space Telescope have identified six galaxies that are far too massive and evolved to have formed so quickly after the Big Bang.
The research, published today in Nature, could upend our model of the Universe and force a drastic rethink of how the first galaxies formed after the Big Bang. “We’ve never observed galaxies of this colossal size, this early on after the Big Bang,” says lead researcher Associate Professor Ivo Labbé from Swinburne University of Technology.
“The six galaxies we found are more than 12 billion years old, only 500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang, reaching sizes up to 100 billion times the mass of our sun. This is too big to even exist within current models.
You can read the paper here [pdf]. The “current models” Labbé is referring to are all the present theories and data that say the Big Bang occurred 13.7 billion years ago. These galaxies, however, found less than a billion years after that event, would have needed 12 billion years to have accumulated their mass.
If confirmed, these galaxies essentially tell us that the Big Bang is wrong, or very very VERY incomplete, and that all the data found that dates its occurrence 13.7 billion years ago, based on the Hubble constant, must be reanalyzed.
It is also possible these galaxies are actually not galaxies, but a new kind of supermassive black hole able to form very quickly. Expect many scientists who are heavily invested in the Big Bang to push for this explanation. It might be true, but their biases are true also, which means that Webb is presenting us with new data that calls for strong skepticism of all conclusions, across the board.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Okay, Big Bang:
A singularity event. BOOM, suddenly there is a universe! But if the Universe is EXPANDING then why aren’t these HUGE Galaxies close to that point in “SPACE” where the singularity existed, OH WAIT THERE WAS NOT SPACE!
Arg. Still just after the BANG, all the matter in the Universe should have been very very close together.
How is it that just a few hundred MILLION years after the BANG these Galaxies are now located at the furthest reaches of our ability to detect them because they are so far away!
How can they be that far away and yet be only a few hundred million years old when we are viewing them, where they are upteen gazillion light years away!
I am really having a hard time with this. If we see something at a distance of 20 billion Light Years away, then that would mean it was 20 Billion Light years away when it emitted the light we SEE before the Big Bang even occurred.
At a few Hundred Million years of age how could any of these Galaxies have been so far away that it takes 13. Billion years for the Light to reach US?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!
Andrew– Physicist Don Lincoln from Fermilab has a series of YouTube videos on these apparent paradoxes which you should check out. He gives very good explanations that may clear up your confusion.
Andrew–
the quick answer concerns “comoving and proper distances.”
ditto on what Concerned said–
check out:
“If the universe is only 14 billion years old, how can it be 92 billion light years wide?”
Don Lincoln
https://youtu.be/vIJTwYOZrGU
9:46
Paul Steinhardt:
“Time to Take the ‘Big Bang’ out of the Big Bang Theory?”
Simmons Foundation Lecture
https://youtu.be/GIlF0oRj9oo
54:45
Andrew,
You asked: “But if the Universe is EXPANDING then why aren’t these HUGE Galaxies close to that point in “SPACE” where the singularity existed …”
You misunderstand the meaning of “expanding.” The universe is not expanding into space, it constitutes all of space, and all of space is expanding. Space itself is expanding. But matter (planets, atoms, galaxies) do do expand inside space; only space is expanding, and it expands into nothing. .
Think of the universe as “flatland,” a two dimensional world, and imagine that flatland is on the surface of a balloon. As the balloon expands, flatland’s space (area) expands, and its galaxies get farther apart. A light ray in flatland would travel around the balloon until it hit something, like a flatlander’s eye. Thus, the light from a galaxy travels the universe until it hits our telescope. Since it travelled 12 billion years, we are seeing that galaxy as it was 12 billion years ago.
This is the fundamental model of the universe, but it relies upon the Big Bang being axiomatic. If the Big Bang didn’t happen, then we have an entirely wrong model of the universe.
This wouldn’t surprise me too much, because our model doesn’t work without dark matter and dark energy, which we have yet to find. They may be as real as the ether was, a century or so ago.
I’ve always been curious. Didn’t there have to be elements present in order to initiate the “big bang”? Where did those come from? What initiated the sequence that created those? What created the elements that created the elements that created the elements, so forth and so on….
Sua Sponte–
the early universe only consisted of hydrogen, helium, and a little bit of lithium. All the other Elements were created in stars and dispersed via nova.
So,
This is a smart group… my most fundamental question is ‘What defined or established the fundamental charge on the electron?’
Lots of other questions like that come to mind.
Sua Sponte asked “I’ve always been curious. Didn’t there have to be elements present in order to initiate the “big bang”? Where did those come from? What initiated the sequence that created those? What created the elements that created the elements that created the elements, so forth and so on….”
There is a book, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing, that asks that question. The elements, the charges, Planck’s constant, the speed of light, and all the other aspects of the universe come out of the nature of the universe.
The Big Bang was not the creation of matter and cetera as we know it. It was a small ball of high density energy that turned into matter as it expanded and “cooled.” Matter condensed out of the energy.
I heard the author on a radio interview, once, and he also explained that the speed of light limit does not affect the speed of the expansion of the universe, only the speed of travel for anything within the universe. In the interview, the author noted that with the universe now expanding at an increasing rate, the expansion between galaxy clusters could itself reach the speed of light, meaning that we would see nothing of any other galaxy clusters, and we would not have any evidence of the Big Bang.
Even if there were no Big Bang, all these questions would still exist, and we would not be able to answer them.
Ultimately, the book explains [*** SPOILER ALERT ***] that due to gravity, if there is a whole lot of nothing, then a whole lot of something appears. He does not seem to realize that he has defined God as gravity, but then, he makes it clear that he is an atheist, meaning that God didn’t create the universe. Even if He did, who created Him?
[*** SPOILER ALERT CONTINUES ***] In the radio interview, the author posited that with galaxy clusters eventually speeding apart at greater than the speed of light, the interstitial regions will become void of anything, and when there is enough nothing in each of these regions, another Big Bang will occur, creating another universe. Since there are many clusters, many, many of these new Big Bangs can eventually occur, and for each new universe, eventually many, many, many new Big Bangs, and on and so forth until there are infinite universes.
Edward–
I’ve read that book. What I don’t like is the premise of the title, cuz’ Energy is not nothing. (E=MCsquared and all.)
Expansion rate of the Universe is (aprox) 70 km per second, per 3.26 light years. At a distance certain, everything is receding from everything else faster than light, and we can never see that stuff.
“97% of Galaxies Are Moving Faster Than Light”
https://youtu.be/cadNZJvfl7s
8:43
What is Charge?
https://youtu.be/uNGHufsPZgE
6:55
wayne: “I’ve read that book. What I don’t like is the premise of the title, cuz’ Energy is not nothing. (E=MCsquared and all.)”
It is even worse than that. He assumes other things also already exist, such as time and gravity. For the additional created universes, after the galactic clusters have moved so far away from each other that they have left huge gaps of nothing in-between, everything already exists. All the forces, all the constants, all the charges and types of particles, and the laws of nature, too. The only thing that the author assumes does not exist is God.
Wayne/Edward, much appreciate the feedback. Haven’t delved much into the discussion/s that are out there, but I always find myself going back and pondering the need for having something present from the beginning in order to have things present now. I don’t believe that “things” can come from nothing unless there is some other hand in play. I find it difficult to believe that everything, including our universe just “happened” out of sheer coincidence. But that’s just me and I’m not trying to sway anyone in any sense.
Sua Sponte,
You’re welcome. It is always fun to have the opportunity to have a discussion on these fundamental questions.
Why is there something rather than nothing? Because if there were nothing, we wouldn’t be here to ask the question. Nobody ever asks “why is there nothing rather than something?” because if there where nothing, there would be no one to ask the question.* Although true, it is a flippant answer and does not help us understand the universe.
Answering this one basic question has been on the mind of man for many tens of thousands of years, and several books open with the question or attempts to answer the question. One is the Bible, which tells us that God created the universe, but does not tell us who created God or who created God’s creator.
Why is there something rather than nothing, and why are the laws of the universe just right to support us as living beings and to support the atoms, planets, and galaxies as we see them? If certain laws or constants were slightly different, the universe would work very differently, and we couldn’t exist at all. The Big Bang is our best hypothesis for how it happened, our best guess based upon the observation that the universe is expanding,** but it does not explain the why it exists, or the where it all came from, or the who or the what created it all.
It is all part of the mystery and the magic of the universe and the world around us, and it is part of the fun to be intelligent enough to ask these questions rather than just take our existence for granted.
_________________
* Well, almost no one asks that question. I had a cat who would go to his food dish, find it empty, and look at me as if to say, “why is there nothing instead of something?”
** If we were able to run time backward, then all the galaxies, stars, and atoms would come together in one giant black hole, or “singularity,” therefore the universe must have started from some kind of singularity. Why was there a singularity in the first place?
If there is anything to “Dark Photon” to negate the blinding light of Olber’s Paradox…maybe Webb could point the way back to Steady State?
Hhmm… I guess the takeaway on this is that the further we can see what we believe to be the visible ‘edge’ of the Universe, the less it looks like an edge.
Sturgill Simpson
“Turtles All The Way Down” (2014)
https://youtu.be/6gBV-Nzq7Pg
3:05
I’m guessing the theory-conflicting data Webb is collecting will be somehow explained by those handy catch-alls: Dark Energy and Dark Matter. They can’t tell us exactly what they are, but boy are they powerful! They shaped the whole universe, or something.