The James Webb Space Telescope’s first images of the distant universe shocked astronomers. Is the discovery of unimaginably distant galaxies a mirage, or a revolution?
Rohan Naidu was sitting at home with his girlfriend when he found the galaxy that nearly broke cosmology. As his algorithm dug through early images from the James Webb Space Telescope late one night in July, Naidu shot to attention. It had sifted out an object that, on closer inspection, was inexplicably massive and dated back to just 300 million years after the big bang, older than any galaxy ever seen before. “I called my girlfriend over right away,” says Naidu.
At stake is nothing less than our very understanding of how the orderly universe we know emerged from primordial chaos. JWST’s early revelations could be poised to rewrite the opening chapters of cosmic history, which concern not only distant epochs and faraway galaxies but also our own existence here, in the familiar Milky Way.
After more than two decades of labor at a cost of some $10 billion, JWST finally launched on Christmas Day 2021. By July 2022, the telescope had reached its deep-space destination, and its instruments had been put through their paces; its long-awaited first year of science observations, known as Cycle 1, could begin. A portion of the telescope’s early time was devoted to high-impact programs across a range of disciplines from which data would immediately be made public.
JWST’s discovery of bright galaxies in the early cosmos challenges this model. “We should see lots of these little protogalactic fragments that have not yet merged to make a big galaxy,” says Stacy McGaugh, a cosmologist at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. “Instead, we’re seeing a few things that are already big galaxies.
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