When astronomers first turned on the James Webb Space Telescope and pointed it out into the black of space, it revealed galaxies that are billions of years old, those that were more or less formed at the dawn of the universe itself. Now experts say that one of them, which they estimate is around 13 billion-years-old, is a bit of an enigma as it shouldn’t exist at all.
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00:04 When astronomers first turned on the James Webb Space
00:06 Telescope and pointed it out into the black of space,
00:09 one of the first images they got was this one.
00:12 It shows galaxies that are billions of years old,
00:14 those that were more or less formed at the dawn
00:17 of the universe itself.
00:18 Now experts say this one, which they estimate
00:21 is around 13 billion years old, is a bit of an enigma,
00:24 as it shouldn't exist at all.
00:26 It's called ZF-UDS-7329, and astronomers
00:31 say the galaxy is too complex to have been created
00:33 in the early days after the Big Bang.
00:36 The issue is it's around the size of the Milky Way,
00:38 but it also has around four times the number of stars
00:41 by mass.
00:42 The issue arises because our current dark matter model
00:44 suggests that it was not in a state
00:46 to support galaxies of this size at that time,
00:48 as it was too smooth.
00:49 Those same models outline that as time went on,
00:51 dark matter ripples grew because of gravity.
00:53 Collecting in larger clusters and dragging other elements,
00:56 namely hydrogen, together with it,
00:58 thus allowing it to create larger, more complex galaxies.
01:01 Another peculiarity about the galaxy
01:03 is that it doesn't seem to have changed much
01:05 after its creation.
01:07 The study's authors say this challenge
01:08 is the standard model of cosmology, adding, quote,
01:11 "The key question now is how they formed so fast
01:14 very early in the universe, and what mysterious mechanisms
01:17 lead to stopping them from forming stars abruptly
01:19 when the rest of the universe is doing so."
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