The James Webb telescope found six galaxies that may be too hefty for their age:
[...] Six galaxies that formed in the universe's first 700 million years seem to be up to 100 times more massive than standard cosmological theories predict, astronomer Ivo Labbé and colleagues report February 22 in Nature. "Adding up the stars in those galaxies, it would exceed the total amount of mass available in the universe at that time," says Labbé, of the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. "So you know that something is afoot."
[...] Measuring the amount of light each object emits in various wavelengths can give astronomers an idea of how far away each galaxy is, and how many stars it must have to emit all that light. Six of the objects that Nelson, Labbé and colleagues identified look like their light comes from no later than about 700 million years after the Big Bang. Those galaxies appear to hold up to 10 billion times the mass of our sun in stars. One of them might contain the mass of 100 billion suns.
"You shouldn't have had time to make things that have as many stars as the Milky Way that fast," Nelson says. Our galaxy contains about 60 billion suns' worth of stars — and it's had more than 13 billion years to grow them. "It's just crazy that these things seem to exist."
In the standard theories of cosmology, matter in the universe clumped together slowly, with small structures gradually merging to form larger ones. "If there are all these massive galaxies at early times, that's just not happening," Nelson says.
One possible explanation is that there's another, unknown way to form galaxies, Labbé says. "It seems like there's a channel that's a fast track, and the fast track creates monsters."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Barenflimski on Monday February 27, @09:58AM (1 child)
The issue with these measurements is that these objects are so far away, they still only show up a a few pixels even with the James Webb Telescope.
The other most likely explanation, is that these are massive black holes. The black hole theory does jive with modern cosmology.
The measuring tools for distances that far are tough to use, and no one is even sure if the tools are accurate for objects so far away. It is possible these things aren't as big as they appear to be because of this.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Tuesday February 28, @03:22PM
There is an interesting hypothesis that the early universe may have developed very differently than the current consensus that fails to explain both the formation of super-massive black holes nearly as large as currently exist, and how early galaxies could have formed into the spiral structures Webb is now revealing so early in their development.
Black hole stars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeWyp2vXxqA [youtube.com]
TL;DR
In the very early universe when hydrogen clouds were just condensing into galaxies, instead of forming billions of small stars within a galaxy, they condensed into a relatively few ultra-massive stars millions of times more massive than those we see today, basically a small galaxy worth of mass in a single star. (for comparison - the largest hypergiant stars we've observed are thousands of times larger than our sun, but only tens of times more massive)
The resulting stars would have evolved very quickly (the larger the star, the shorter its lifespan), with the core eventually collapsing into a black hole to trigger a supernova... BUT, they would be so massive that the explosion would be insufficient to tear the star apart, so you'd have a ultra-massive star with a black hole at its core, with the intense pressure force-feeding the black hole far faster than normal, allowing it to grow to super-massive scales very quickly.
The energies in the accretion disc would continue to climb as the black hole grows, until eventually a second explosion (an ultra-nova?) resulted, powerful enough to finally rip apart the star and leave the now super-massive black hole in its center exposed, ready to begin merging with its siblings to form the supermassive black holes we see today on the observed schedule, as well as sculpting early galaxies into spirals that can both form stars and feed the central black more rapidly than the less structured globular clusters.
Supposedly Webb should potentially be able to see far enough to glimpse at least the last of such behemoths, which would be far brighter than a similar mass worth of typical stars, and thus at a scale of few pixels would look very much like an unexpectedly massive early galaxy...
(Score: 5, Interesting) by cykros on Monday February 27, @10:57AM (2 children)
I'm no physicist or astronomer, but if there's more light than anticipated based on what it'd mean in terms of mass, is it not possible that the light, rather than coming from reactions of matter with matter (as we have with stars), could instead be the result of matter reacting with anti-matter? The reactants would have a net mass of 0g, and the energy output would be massive. To a point where the guy that's seen too much sci fi in me wonders if it's enough to separate matter from anti-matter ex nihilo, and potentially even create a chain reaction (which, likely, would "burn out" eventually, as it could never be a 100% efficient process when it comes to energy consumption).
Or, you know, we could just have models that came up with the wrong expectations for mass in the first place, millions of light years away. But anti-matter is much cooler.
(Score: 3, Informative) by hendrikboom on Monday February 27, @06:48PM
Antimatter has positive mass.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday February 28, @03:50PM
Afraid not.
As already mentioned, antimatter has positive mass - that's where the energy comes from. Einstein said that mass is a property of energy: his equation was originally written m = E/c^2 to reflect that. And that's stood the test of time and countless experiments. Matter just happens to be the densest concentration of energy we know of, by far.
Which basically means the idea of converting mass to energy is a fundamental misunderstanding of physics: you can convert *matter* to energy, but the resulting energy will still have *exactly* the same mass as it did when it was matter.
Similarly you can create matter and antimatter from energy (we do so all the time in particle accelerators) - but doing so requires enough energy to provide 100% of the mass of the resulting matter. It's a zero-sum game in either direction. No self-sustaining runaway chain reactions possible.
Now, as for a matter-antimatter cloud - it would indeed make for a very bright object - but I believe most of the radiation would be released as gamma rays - incredibly high energy photons capable of carrying away the mass of annihilating atoms - the heaviest ever detected from space had roughly the mass of an iron atom concentrated into a single photon (photons have zero rest mass, but they can't exist at rest, and do in fact have the same "traveling mass" as any other concentration of the same amount of energy. I like to explain it as "zero mass times the infinite mass multiplier from traveling at light speed = a definite real mass." Which is wrong, but semi-intuitively explains why theoretically massless particles can still have mass anyway without digging into much more complicated physics)
There's also the question of how such a cloud of antimatter could exist - all the antimatter should have already annihilated in the very early universe when the density of pre-molecular plasma was vastly higher than anything seen today. Long before the universe became transparent and left the CMBR as the oldest observable phenomena in the universe.