Astronomers have discovered what appear to be huge galaxies dating to 600 million years after the Big Bang, suggesting that the early universe may have had a stellar fast track that produced these “monsters.”
Although the new Webb Space Telescope has discovered older galaxies, dating to just 300 million years before the beginning of the universe, it is the size and maturity of these six apparent megagalaxies that have left scientists stunned. On Wednesday they released their findings.
Lead researcher Ivo Labbe of Swinburne University of Technology in Australia and his team expected to find small galaxies so close to the dawn of the Universe, but not these monsters.
“Although most galaxies in this era are still small and grow gradually over time,” he explains in an email, “there are some monsters that quickly reach maturity.” Why this happens or how it would work is unknown.
Each of the six objects appears to weigh billions of times more than our Sun. In one of them, the total weight of all its stars could be up to 100 billion times that of our Sun, according to the scientists, who published their findings in the journal Nature.
Labbe said he and his team didn’t initially think the results were real — that there couldn’t be galaxies as mature as our Milky Way so early in time — and that they still need to be confirmed. The objects appeared so large and bright that some team members thought they had made a mistake.
“We were in awe, somewhat in disbelief,” Labbe said.
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