Revealing 3 'red monsters' that overturn the laws of cosmic evolution

Familiar theories about the early universe may have to be rewritten because of

Familiar theories about the early universe may have to be rewritten because of the "red monsters" that NASA's super telescope has just captured.

According to Live Science, the James Webb super telescope developed by NASA and co-operated with ESA and CSA (European and Canadian space agencies) has just captured three monster galaxies that "should not exist".

According to the Big Bang theory, the widely accepted cosmological model, our universe began 13.8 billion years ago.

It took a long time for subatomic particles to form, then atoms and atomic clouds, where the first stars and galaxies were born.

Picture 1 of Revealing 3 'red monsters' that overturn the laws of cosmic evolution

Three "red monsters" that should not exist have just been discovered - (Photo: NASA/ESA/CSA/UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER).

According to this model and subsequent theories, everything in the early universe was monotonous and developed slowly in steps.

The first galaxies that existed during the Cosmic Dawn—1 billion years after the Big Bang—were tiny and primitive. They grew steadily over the next billion years through star formation, collisions, and mergers.

The three "red monsters" that have just appeared show the opposite.

Publishing research in the scientific journal Nature , an international research team said these three "red monsters" are three galaxies with a mass 100 billion times that of the Sun and were photographed in space 12.8 billion years ago.

They belong to the first generation of galaxies of the Cosmic Dawn period and are only a few hundred million years old, according to the basic theories mentioned above.

This mass is approximately that of our Milky Way galaxy, which has spent more than 13 billion years growing and merging with at least 20 other galaxies.

So the masses of these three monster galaxies are almost completely absurd: According to basic models, they could not have had enough time or material to become so huge.

"Many of the rules of galaxy evolution tend to impose a speed limit; but somehow these red monsters seem to have overcome all the barriers," said co-author Stijn Wuyts from the University of Bath (UK).

The conventional view among astronomers is that galaxies form inside giant dark matter halos, whose strong gravity pulls ordinary matter like gas and dust inward before compressing them to form stars.

They also assumed that only 20% of the infalling gas became stars. The three galaxies above turn this view upside down, because they can only exist when 80% of the infalling gas becomes stars.

"These results indicate that galaxies in the early universe can form stars with unexpected efficiency," lead author Mengyuan Xiao from the University of Geneva in Switzerland told Live Science.

Update 22 November 2024
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