Familiar theories about the early universe may need to be rewritten due to the discovery of “red monsters” captured by NASA’s super telescope.
According to Live Science, the James Webb Space Telescope, developed and co-operated by NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), has captured images of three “red monster” galaxies that “should not exist.”
According to the widely accepted Big Bang theory, our universe began 13.8 billion years ago.
It took a long time for subatomic particles to form, followed by atoms and atomic clouds, where the first stars and galaxies were born.
Three “red monsters” that should not exist have just been discovered – (Photo: NASA/ESA/CSA/University of Colorado Boulder).
According to this model and subsequent theories, everything in the early universe was monotonous and developed slowly in stages.
In this context, the first galaxies that existed during the cosmic dawn—1 billion years after the Big Bang—were very small and primitive. They only gradually grew over the following billions of years through star formation, collisions, and mergers.
The three “red monsters” that have just emerged reveal the opposite.
In a study published in the scientific journal Nature, an international research team stated that these three “red monsters” are galaxies with a mass 100 billion times that of the Sun and were captured in a region of space 12.8 billion years ago.
They belong to the first generation of galaxies from the cosmic dawn and are only a few hundred million years old, according to the aforementioned basic theories.
This mass is approximately equal to our Milky Way galaxy, which has undergone over 13 billion years of growth and mergers with at least 20 other galaxies.
Therefore, the mass of these three monster galaxies is nearly completely unreasonable: According to basic models, they should not have had enough time or material to become so massive.
“Many rules in the process of galaxy evolution tend to impose a speed limit; yet somehow, these red monsters seem to have surpassed all barriers,” said co-author Stijn Wuyts from the University of Bath (UK).
The conventional view among astronomers is that galaxies form within massive dark matter halos, which have strong gravitational forces that pull in ordinary matter like gas and dust before compressing them to form stars.
They also believe that only 20% of gas falls into forming stars. The three galaxies mentioned above have overturned this view, as they could only exist if 80% of the gas fell into forming stars.
“These results suggest that galaxies in the early universe may have formed stars with unexpected efficiency,” said lead author Mengyuan Xiao from the University of Geneva (Switzerland) in an interview with Live Science.
