But those reddish dots revealed in Webb's deep fields appear 50 times more massive than that, Leja said. They also had not expected to find galaxies more massive than perhaps a billion suns. In ancient galaxies that Webb was built to spot, astronomers had not expected to see old red stars. With age, stars develop a redder glow as they burn through their fuel and cool down. Young stars in general shine bright blue. "Previous studies of the early universe with Hubble and other instruments tend to find small, blue, baby galaxies at early times: objects which have just recently formed out of the primordial cosmic soup and are themselves building their early stars and structures."
"We had specific expectations for the type of galaxies that live in the early universe: they are young and small," Joel Leja, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State and one of the authors of the study, told in an email. The new findings are in conflict with existing ideas of how the universe looked and evolved in its early years, and don't match earlier observations made by Webb's less powerful predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope. Related: 12 amazing James Webb Space Telescope discoveries across the universeīut the galaxies found in the Webb images appeared shockingly big, and the stars in them too old. Astronomers expected that first star clusters sprung up shortly after the universe moved out of the so-called dark ages - the first 400 million years of its existence when only a thick fog of hydrogen atoms permeated space. Such early galaxies are not in themselves surprising. By analyzing the light emitted by these galaxies, astronomers established that they were viewing them in our universe's infancy only 500 million to 700 million years after the Big Bang. These galaxies, described in a new study based on Webb's first data release, are so far away that they appear only as tiny reddish dots to the powerful telescope.
ASTRO BANG FULL
Galaxies nearly as massive as the Milky Way and full of mature red stars seem to be dispersed in deep field images obtained by the James Webb Space Telescope (Webb or JWST) during its early observation campaign, and they are giving astronomers a headache. And now, nobody can explain how they had formed.
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