These red dots could change everything we think we know about how galaxies form | 24CA News

Scientists have peered billions of years into the previous and found one thing that would basically change what we expect we find out about how galaxies type.

Images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) present brilliant six pink dots, that are believed to be distant galaxies as they’d have appeared greater than 13 billion years in the past.

But if they’re certainly galaxies, then they’re in contrast to any galaxies that scientists have beforehand noticed. That’s as a result of they’re impossibly massive and dense for his or her comparatively younger age.

“The first thing I said was, ‘There’s no way that’s right. That’s insane,'” astronomer Katherine Suess informed As It Happens host Nil Köksal.

Suess, a cosmology fellow at Stanford University and UC Santa Cruz, is among the authors of a research describing the invention, which was printed final week within the journal Nature.

What is a galaxy and the way is it shaped?

A galaxy is a set of gasoline, mud, darkish matter, stars and their photo voltaic techniques, all held collectively by gravity. According to NASA, most are between 10 billion and 13.6 billion years outdated.

Because gentle takes time to journey from one place to a different, telescope photographs are snapshots of the previous. These mysterious pink dots had been photographed as they’d have appeared about 500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang created the universe 13.8 billion years in the past.

And but, already, they’ve mass and density far past what scientists thought potential in that timeframe — rivalling our personal Milky Way, which is believed to 13.6 billion years outdated, not a lot youthful than the universe itself.

That flies within the face of how scientists believed galaxies shaped within the early universe, Suess says.

“So there’s the Big Bang, which is the beginning of everything — you know. It’s the beginning of all of space, all of time, all of matter, all of energy. And then we think it takes some amount of time for things to grow. You know, so galaxies have to gobble up all of this gas and form it into stars before we can see them,” she mentioned.

“And we thought this process took billions of years. But instead we found this huge galaxy less than 500 million years after the Big Bang — which sounds like a lot, but it’s like only three per cent of the total age of the universe. So it’s really, really fast.”

One of those potential galaxies has an equal mass as our Milky Way galaxy does right this moment.

“I have a two-year-old nephew, so it’s like if I went to go wake my nephew up from a nap, and instead of being my two year old nephew, he was like 40,” Suess mentioned. “It’s not what you think you’re going to find.”

Is this the actual deal? Only time will inform

Canadian extragalactic astronomer Sarah Gallagher, who was not concerned within the analysis, says the findings are “intriguing,” but in addition “something that needs to be checked out.”

In order to substantiate their findings, the researchers will use spectroscopy information — an in-depth take a look at the absorption and emission of sunshine — which is able to give a greater image of what these pink dots actually are made from, in addition to how outdated and enormous they are surely.

It’s potential that these pink dots aren’t galaxies in any respect, however fairly another supply of sunshine like a supermassive black gap or a quasar, the researchers say.

Or it is potential, says Gallagher, that they’re galaxies, however the scientists made some incorrect assumptions about them — for instance, the mass of the celebs which can be emitting the sunshine.

“The thing is, a galaxy in the very early universe is not at all like a galaxy like our Milky Way today,” mentioned Gallagher, the director of Western University’s institute for Earth and Space Exploration in London, Ont.

“We have a very good understanding of how galaxies like our Milky Way form stars and evolve over time. But we don’t really know what those very, very young galaxies were like.”

But the opposite chance, says Gallagher, is that these are, certainly, huge child galaxies, and the universe merely works otherwise than we had assumed.

“It just means that basically we thought we understood the story of how galaxies form in the early universe, and we were wrong. And you know what? That’s pretty cool,” she mentioned.

“I mean, that’s why you put telescopes like James Webb out there, because you don’t know the answer to these questions. And so we’ll have to change our understanding.”

In that case, Suess says, it means the Milky Way is not the one method.

“Our Milky Way probably formed much later in the universe, and so we thought that was standard. But it turns out that some things can really form extremely, extremely quickly,” she mentioned. “It implies that there’s this really large diversity of ways that galaxies can grow.”

If there’s something we have discovered since JWST launched in December 2021, it is that there is a lot we nonetheless do not know.

“With this new telescope, we’ve opened this whole new view into the distant universe. And it’s the very first time we can look at these earliest aspects of the cosmos in this much detail,” she mentioned.

“I think right now it’s basically the most exciting time in extragalactic astronomy since the launch of Hubble more than 30 years ago. And so, you know, I think the next couple of years will be filled with discoveries like this.”