World's most powerful telescope captures something that threatens to upend cosmology

It is a "monster" object that was born when our universe was only a few hundred million years old.

The world's most powerful space telescope, James Webb, has just taken a "time-traveling" look into the ancient universe and discovered something shocking: A galaxy even larger than the Milky Way.

According to Associate Professor Claudia Lagos from the International Center for Astronomical Research, co-author of the new study, this ancient "monster" is posing a major challenge to the standard cosmological model.

Its existence, is completely absurd!

The Milky Way, the galaxy that contains Earth , is one of the largest galaxies in the universe. It was formed as a result of dozens of galaxies merging and swallowing each other, gradually growing into a giant monster.

And to do that, it takes time.

But the giant galaxy in question - named ZF-UDS-7329 - was born too early and was observed at a very young age.

The image that James Webb captured is an image of ZF-UDS-7329 from 11.5 billion years ago.

According to Live Science, measurements show that the image captured by James Webb is an image of ZF-UDS-7329 from 11.5 billion years ago. Further calculations show that at that time it was 1.5 billion years old, meaning it was born 13 billion years ago.

Meanwhile, the universe is about 13.8 billion years old.

Astronomers are unsure when the first stellar particles began to coalesce into galaxies, but estimate that it must have happened slowly, at least a few hundred million years after the Big Bang that gave birth to the universe.

The first galactic "seeds" were made up of clusters of dark matter combined with gas.

After the first 1-2 billion years of the universe, dwarf galaxies reached their "teenage" age, began to pair up, swallowing each other to grow into larger galaxies.

The ZF-UDS-7329 has debunked that whole theory.

Our Milky Way also originated from the early universe, which means it has also spent billions of years growing.

ZF-UDS-7329 may be even "younger," but it reached its absurdly large size 11.5 billion years ago, leaving astronomers puzzled as to how it got there.

Even the universe at the time ZF-UDS-7329 was born did not have enough dark matter to seed the number of "baby" dwarf galaxies needed to clump together to create it.

Not only that, this galaxy is also a dead man . Although it was very young at the time of observation, its star formation process has ended.

"This pushes the boundaries of our understanding of how galaxies form and evolve," admitted Dr Themiya Nanayakkara, co-author from Swinburne University of Technology (Australia).

They hope to search for more such mysterious "monsters" to see if there are other mysterious mechanisms in the early universe that could explain the existence of these strange objects.