The James-Webb Space Telescope observed in remote ages of the Universe a population of very massive galaxies appearing to have formed at a much faster rate than predicted by astronomers, according to a study on Wednesday.
This confusing scenario, which further analysis will have to confirm, occurred between 500 and 700 million years only following the Big Bang occurred 13.8 billion years ago. Either in the very young Universe, therefore very distant.
The James-Webb Telescope (JWST), operational since July 2022, was able to explore this little-known region thanks to its NIRCam instrument and its powerful infrared vision, a wavelength invisible to the human eye and whose observation allows us to go far back in time.
He unearthed six galaxies much more massive than expected in this primordial Universe, reports a study published in Nature. Two of them had already been pointed by the Hubble telescope, but had gone unnoticed as the light emitted was weak.
These six galaxies contain many more stars than expected. One of them would contain up to 100 billion.
It took our galaxy 13.8 billion years to form this many stars, when this young galaxy would have done the same in just 700 million years “20 times faster”according to Ivo Labbé, a researcher at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia.
Such distant galaxies of this size have no place in the current cosmological model which attempts to understand the structure of the Universe. “The theory tells us that at these early ages, galaxies are very small and grow very slowly. You would typically expect them to be 10 to 100 times smaller in terms of the amount of stars”develops the astrophysicist.
AFP