Posted on 04/28/2025 6:12:28 AM PDT by Red Badger
These findings suggest that the universe’s first billion years were far more crowded and complex than models had predicted.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has made a discovery that is changing what scientists thought they knew about the early universe. Astronomers have found huge, star-forming galaxies — nicknamed “red monsters” — that formed faster and more efficiently than ever imagined.
The Early Universe Was Much Busier Than Expected Since its launch, JWST has revealed a much richer universe than astronomers had expected. Studies now show that the young cosmos had 10 to 100 times more galaxies than models suggested.
Some of these galaxies also appeared bigger and more organized than scientists thought possible for that early time. Early observations even hinted at the existence of “impossible” galaxies — ones so massive that they seemed to defy the amount of available matter.
Later studies showed that these galaxies were actually closer than originally estimated, making their sizes more reasonable. But a new study, published in Nature, goes further by confirming that some early galaxies grew at a speed that standard theories cannot explain.
Meeting the “Red Monsters” In the FRESCO survey, which used JWST to study 36 massive galaxies, astronomers spotted three galaxies that stood out. These “red monsters” converted nearly half of their available matter into stars. That’s a star-formation rate about 500 times faster than what we see in the Milky Way today.
Mengyuan Xiao, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Geneva and lead author of the study, called these galaxies “the beginning of a new era” in exploring the early universe. The extreme efficiency in star formation suggests that the first galaxies were capable of growing much faster than researchers ever thought.
How Did These Galaxies Grow So Fast? The rapid growth of the “red monsters” remains a mystery. One idea is that they formed in regions where matter was densely packed, making it easier for gas to fuel star formation. This would make them early versions of the galaxy clusters we see today.
Another theory points to the role of supermassive black holes, which were already active during the early universe. These black holes could have compressed surrounding gas, speeding up the creation of stars. But according to David Elbaz, an astrophysicist at the CEA and co-author of the study, “We still cannot reproduce a universe that was so structured so early on.”
More data and better computer simulations will be needed to fully understand what happened.
Deeper Findings From the Fresco Survey The study provides even more detail. It confirms that galaxy formation rates between redshifts 5 and 9 were two to three times higher than the most efficient galaxies found at later times.
The “red monsters” are part of a group of dusty, star-forming galaxies that are mostly invisible in optical light. These galaxies were detected through a detailed analysis of images and spectra gathered by the FRESCO survey using JWST’s NIRCam instrument.
Researchers used the corrected magnitudes from specific infrared filters to identify these dusty galaxies. They also measured their masses and found that some of them, like a galaxy labeled S1, were already extremely massive just 600 million years after the Big Bang.
In fact, the most extreme source, S1, had been detected before only at submillimeter wavelengths and remained invisible in optical light until JWST observations.
By analyzing the structure and star-formation activity of these galaxies, the scientists found that they are not dominated by active galactic nuclei but are truly massive star-forming systems.
The advanced growth of these galaxies so early in cosmic history shows just how much faster structures formed than scientists had ever predicted.
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WEBB Ping!....................
Why move to a red state when you can move to a red galaxy?
AH! so the universe was a baby at one time!
So who were its parents? What is the source of the matter in the “infinitely” dense ball of matter? Where did the energy come from for it to expand into the huge universe that we observe today?
Just asking.
Until someone invents the warp drive, it will take a lot less time to move to a red state than to a red galaxy.
... and there’s no guarantee that a bunch of people from blue galaxies won’t move in, institute vote-by-mail, and turn it blue, and ruin it.
Looks like the ‘models’ are wrong. Back to the drawing board.
One question that has always puzzled me is when scientists say a certain event is from the early beginnings of the universe, I wonder how they know the event is from the early universe instead of saying the event is from the early universe as we know it, because our technology right now with the Webb Telescope only looks back into space so far.
I have a belief the universe is infinite, there is no end or beginning, in 50 years we will likely have even greater technology that allows us to look back into space many times further than the Webb telescope can currently look.
5.73 years......
You and I believe the same things. I’ve said, for most of my life, that I think the universe is infinite and eternal. The universe may go through “seasons,” the cycles of life and death we see everywhere, but it has always existed, and always will.
These articles remind me of the early days of exoplanet discovery. When it first started happening, the discoveries were few and far between, and scientists were “stunned” each time they found a new one. Then it became more and more common, until it was realized it wasn’t uncommon at all. Exoplanets, like everything else in the universe, were abundant.
In this case, the same will start to happen as our tech allows us to peer further and further into the universe.
The Milky Way is for the most part a finished product. At the time the light we now see left these “Red Monsters” they were in building phase. That was millions or billions of years ago.
The wonders our God has wrought!
Refer to post # 14.
BUT GLOBAL WARMING IS SETTLED SCIENCE! All the models say so.
The speed of light is finite. We can’t look back farther in space than light has had the time to reach us. These red monsters are currently 26-30 billion light years away (redshifts of 5-9) from us, and the age of the Universe is 14 billion years. The expansion of the Universe allows the distance to be larger than the distance-age of the Universe because of the expansion of the Universe.
Blue staters are way ahead of this. They are already warped
Wow! Thanks for the ping.
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