Scientists expected the James Webb Space Telescope to reveal unknowns in the deepest realms of space.
But they certainly didn’t anticipate this.
While scanning a region of the cosmos near the Big Dipper, a group of astronomers identified six faint objects as they appeared well over 13 billion years ago. They suspect the objects are ancient galaxies. Scientists expect such early collections of stars and swirling matter to be relatively small. After all, such galaxies hadn’t had much time to form or grow. But these galaxies are giants, the researchers report.
“It’s bananas,” Erica Nelson, an astrophysicist at CU Boulder who worked on the new research, said in a statement(Opens in a new tab).
It’s bananas because the objects, which are “red and bright” in the Webb observations, might host billions of stars (and many more planets), similar to our Milky Way galaxy. These galaxies formed some 500 to 700 million years after the universe was created during the Big Bang(Opens in a new tab), and at such a time there simply shouldn’t have been enough matter around to create fantastic bursts of stars and solar systems, Nelson explained.
Read more: Webb telescope just found massive objects that shouldn’t exist in deep space