Using the James Webb telescope, astronomers identified six supermassive galaxies in the early universe. This was reported by the press service of Pennsylvania State University.
The James Webb Infrared Telescope was launched into orbit at the end of 2021. One of its main goals was to observe the young universe: due to the quality of its optics, the telescope can see objects billions of light years away. Therefore, the device opens a “window to the past” for astronomers and allows you to restore the chronology of the evolution of galaxies.
It is believed that the first galaxies appeared 300-400 million years after the Big Bang. For a long time, scientists believed that they were small at that time and grew slowly, but observations of the past decades have shown that this is not so – huge galaxies already existed in the first billion years of the universe’s existence, by all means. 13.8 billion years.
Astronomers were able to see galaxies 13.1 billion light-years away from Earth in James Webb’s new images. They are observed 500-750 million years after the Big Bang.
To the surprise of astronomers, they were able to simultaneously detect six massive galaxies in the James Webb images, with masses exceeding the mass of the sun by about 100 billion times. This makes them comparable in size to the Milky Way, as well as the Andromeda and Whirlpool galaxies, the relatively large spiral galaxies of the modern Universe.
These observations go against most modern cosmological models, which will likely require radical revisions.