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Galaxies ‘too big to even exist’ discovered using James Webb Space Telescope [scimex.org]

An international team, led by a Swinburne University of Technology researcher, has discovered the seemingly impossible. Using the powerful James Webb Space Telescope, they have observed massive candidate galaxies at the beginning of time, up to 100 billion times the mass of the Sun which, if confirmed, would contain more mass than was thought to exist in the whole Universe at that time.

The research, published today in Nature, could upend our model of the Universe and force a drastic rethink of how the first galaxies formed after the Big Bang.

“We’ve never observed galaxies of this colossal size, this early on after the Big Bang,” says lead researcher Associate Professor Ivo Labbé from Swinburne University of Technology.

“The six galaxies we found are more than 12 billion years old, only 500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang, reaching sizes up to 100 billion times the mass of our sun. This is too big to even exist within current models.

“This discovery could transform our understanding of how the earliest galaxies in our Universe formed.”

Follow up measurements are being carried out to confirm the galaxies and rule out alternative explanations.

“One alternative, equally fascinating, is that some of the objects belong to a new class of emerging supermassive black holes, never seen before,” Associate Professor Labbé says.

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-05786-2 [nature.com]

https://www.brusselstimes.com/belgium/378205/real-shocker-six-massive-galaxies-could-upend-settled-science [brusselstimes.com]
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/980134 [eurekalert.org]

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