Witness the Webb telescope’s unexpected discovery: the universe has evolved much faster than previously thought

Even when the universe was only 600 million years old, 3% of its current age of about 13.8 billion years, it was filled with many more sources of light than physicists’ models predicted. New observations by the James Webb Telescope show that many more stars caught fire in the first galaxies than astrophysicists thought possible.

One of the galaxies observed by the Webb telescope at the beginning of the universe appears to have evolved like our own Milky Way, of which the Sun is a part.

This is now shown by a study published in nature It was co-authored by astrophysicist Joel Lega.

– We had no idea what we would find, and it turned out to be something so unexpected that it creates problems for science, he says.

By that he means that astrophysicists must now go back to the drawing board and change their theories about how this happened when the first stars lit up.

Perhaps the stars shone brighter

Jonathan Tan is an astrophysicist at Chalmers University of Technology who specializes in exactly how stars and black holes formed in the early universe. He has many suggestions for what could have been so bright in the infancy of the universe.

One explanation is that the stars at that time were more efficient and brilliant than they are today. In such cases, it could explain the bright light at the dawn of the universe captured by Webb’s telescope.

– I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out that stars in the early universe behaved differently than they do today, and I think these observations indicate that. He says that if this turns out to be true, then it’s very exciting.

Play the video above to see James Webb’s images of the distant galaxies of the universe’s childhood.