FOUR DISCOVERIES FROM THE JAMES WEBB TELESCOPE CHALLENGE OUR EXPANDING UNIVERSE CONCEPT.




The beginning of the universe is an exciting topic to explore. It’s not just for scientists, but for anyone who has ever wondered about how we got here.

The Big Bang theory is the most widely accepted scientific explanation of the early universe. The theory says that all matter in the universe was once concentrated in one infinitely dense point called a singularity. Right after the big bang, the universe was a hot soup of particles. It was dark, dense, and opaque because the free electrons would have caused the light (photons) to scatter the way sunlight scatters from the water droplets in the clouds.

But as time passed the universe continued to expand and cool and it became much less dense as the electrons began joining with nuclei and electrons collided less often with photons. Now with the electrons out of the photons way the path was clear for lights Great Escape 378 thousand years after the Big Bang. No matter how big or powerful our telescopes become the Cosmic Microwave Background is the oldest light we will ever be able to see.


 MICROWAVE BACKGROUND RADIATION. UNIVERS'S BABY PICTURE.


The first stars and galaxies were formed from hydrogen and helium gas that was left over from the Big Bang. As more stars formed, they also began to produce heavier elements like carbon, oxygen, and iron.

This theory was first proposed by Belgian priest and astronomer Georges Lemaître in 1927. He proposed that the Universe began as a point, and then exploded with a huge release of energy. The Big Bang theory is supported by many pieces of evidence such as the Cosmic Background Radiation, Hubble's Law, and redshift. 

But new observations from the James Webb Telescope are challenging our predictions. Whatever the Webb Telescope observed in the distant universe is completely denying our early universe model. 

As our Early Universe model predicted that the tiny galaxies grow up into present-day massive galaxies by colliding with each other, so scientists did expect to see badly mangled galaxies scrambled by many collisions or mergers. But what Webb Telescope found shocked everyone, new images from Webb Telescope showed massive galaxies with overwhelming smooth disks and neat spiral forms, just as we see in today's galaxies. It means that some of these large galaxies did not form by the collision of tiny galaxies, in plain language this data utterly destroys the Merger theory. Therefore these massive galaxies were not tiny, to begin with.


So we can also see massive and well-structured galaxies in the early universe as well, this was previously denied by the Big Bang model.

In addition to this Webb Telescope also detected some most distant galaxy candidates in the early universe, One of these distant galaxies is named CEERS-93316.


 CEERS-93316 MOST DISTANT GALAXY CANDIDATE


CEERS-93316 is a candidate high redshift galaxy, with an estimated redshift of z~16.7, corresponding to 235 million years after the Big Bang. But what makes this distant galaxy candidate special is its brightness and size. Scientists said that it is very challenging to produce such extraordinary luminous and massive galaxies only 200 million years after the Big Bang according to our current model of the Early Universe. 


 credit - Harikane et al.

                                                              

Recently in a paper astronomers claimed that from the first JWST images they found two massive galaxies with stellar masses M∗∼10^11M⊙ at a redshift of z~10. This means these massive galaxies were already largely in place 500 million years after the Big Bang. The presence of these galaxies at z~10 suggests that massive galaxies may be found to redshift as high as z~18, which is just 175 million years after the Big Bang. But our current Early Universe model completely denies this. According to our current galaxy evolution model, the formation of such massive galaxies is not possible just 150 million years after The Big Bang.

The author also said that the new images show that there are at least 100,000 times as many galaxies as theorists predicted at redshifts more than 10. There is no way that so many large galaxies can be generated in so little time.

Some scientists are claiming that the expanding universe idea is also wrong. They are saying that the non-expanding universe is supporting all these discoveries of the James Webb Telescope to some extent.

Nevertheless, further discoveries of the Webb Telescope are going to challenge our understanding of the Early Universe.