A Galaxy With Too Old Stars Was Found In The Young Universe

Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, scientists can discover what happened shortly after the birth of the universe billions of years ago. This is possible because light does not travel instantly, which means that we can see very distant objects as they were a long time ago.

One of the unsolvable mysteries that emerged from Webb’s data was the ultramassive galaxies found from its images. The fact is that according to the currently accepted cosmological model, such large objects should not have appeared so early. Scientists have suggested that it is not the cosmological theory that has been established over decades that is wrong, but the conclusions about the objects captured by Webb.

Using the Webb instruments, scientists found that the spectrum of the ZF-UDS-7329 galaxy contains traces of very ancient stars for that time. Basically, the age of the stars in the distant galaxy ranged from 1 to 1.5 billion years. Moreover, the mass of stars was 4 times greater than the mass of stars in our Milky Way galaxy. It looks incredible. It turns out that the massive galaxy formed 400 million years after the Big Bang. This greatly limits basic models of galaxy formation and evolution and effectively challenges all current theories of astrophysics.

According to our ideas, for the birth of such massive galaxies at that time there simply would not have been enough dark matter, because it is believed that it is precisely this that ensures the assembly of matter in space and the triggering of star formation. Thus, new discoveries also help create a framework for the study of this mysterious and elusive substance, without which there would be no stars, planets and you and me.