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Now they will have to rewrite the cosmic evolution chapters in all the textbooks - again. I wonder how many decades it will take until they get this updated?

From a friend:

Now that the March 15 edition of Science News has arrived, I'm finally getting around to posting some information from the March 1 issue. In a feature article "Mature before their time: In the youthful universe, some galaxies were already old " by Ron Cowen, there is some information pointing to possible problems for the standard model of cosmogony.

"In mid-December, scientists announced in a press release that they had found a group of distant galaxies that were already senior citizens, chockablock with elderly, red stars in year 2 billion years after the Big Bang.... Some of those galaxies were nearly as large as the largest galaxies in the universe today."

"On Jan. 7, another team posted on online report asserting it had found that the oldest, and therefore most distant galaxy known. If confirmed, the study indicates that some galaxies were in place and forming stars at a prolific rate when the universe, now 13.7 billion years old, was just an 800 million year old whippersnapper."

"The next galaxy-shaking event occurred on Jan. 9when astronomers reported in Seattle at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society that they had found the farthest known quasar. This quasar is so distant that the light it emitted 13 billion years ago, when the universe was so young that galactic structures were still forming, has only now reached Earth.... The light... is so bright that it almost certainly was fueled by a super-massive black hole that already had coalesced and lead several billion times the mass of the sun. "

"In the Jan. 23 Nature, other researchers reported evidence that such black holes indeed formed early ... and we're already devouring matter voraciously a mere billion years after the big bang... "

"Finally, on Feb. 11, cosmologists unveiled at a NASA press briefing in Washington, D.C., [a study of] the cosmic microwave background ... An analysis of the radiation revealed that the universe had already managed to make a plethora of stars-- which had enough collective energy to ionize all the hydrogen in the cosmos-- just 200,000,000 years after the Big Bang... that's several hundred million years earlier than many astronomers had estimated. "

"However... it's still uncertain how much of the chapter on early galaxy formation will need to be rewritten."

"Astronomers have known for more than a decade that a few rare galaxies, which arose in unusually dense regions of the universe, managed to acquire a large amount of mass in a short amount of time. "

"But the standard model still can't easily account for a large number of much shorter or massive galaxies in the early universe."

"The biggest challenge to the standard model of galaxy formation... could be the number of large galaxies showing the spiral structure... in the early universe. ... the number of large spirals ... is double that predicted by the standard theory..."

"One caveat... There's no consensus on whether the galaxies {in the study}our representative of the universe at large... near-infrared observations of another tiny patch, known as Hubble Deep Field North, don't show a similar population of old or large galaxies... "

On the other hand, the findings showing all those spiral galaxies "aren't the only evidence for a significant population of rapidly maturity galaxies in the early universe. At a galaxy-formation meeting in mid-January in Aspen, Colo., [a researcher] reported other evidence that the 2-billion-year-old universe was populated with as many galaxies marked by a red, senior starters as by blue, more youthful stars. "

"'This is an important result if true, but it's an extrapolation' from a limited data set, cautions Harry C. Ferguson of the Space Telescope Science Institute. If accurate, this new view of Galactic demography might force astronomers to rethink the fundamentals of galaxy formation. "

"it would also solve a puzzle cited by Ferguson and his collaborators in the April 20, 2002 Astrophysical Journal: Young, star-forming galaxies seen in the early universe don't have enough energy to have stripped hydrogen atoms of their lone electrons. If hydrogen atoms in the intergalactic medium had remained un-ionized, they would have absorbed all the starlight and the universe would have stayed dark. Ferguson speculates that the population of massive galaxies seen only with infrared detectors might be the hidden dynamo responsible for the extensive ionization... "