"THE MODELS JUST DON'T PREDICT THIS..."
Snap Shot
Over the past several months, NASA's ultra-powerful James
Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has allowed humankind some unprecedented glimpses
into the farthest reaches of our universe. And unsurprisingly, some of these
dazzling new observations have raised more questions than they've answered.
For a long time, for instance, scientists believed the
universe's earliest, oldest galaxies to be small, slightly chaotic, and
misshapen systems. But according to the Washington Post, JWST-captured imagery
has revealed those galaxies to be shockingly massive, not to mention balanced
and well-formed — a finding that challenges, and will likely rewrite, long-held
understandings about the origins of our universe.
"The models just don't predict this," Garth
Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California at Santa Cruz, told
WaPo. "How do you do this in the universe at such an early time? How do
you form so many stars so quickly?"
Move Over, Hubble
As WaPo explains, older images of the universe — as captured
by the recently dethroned Hubble Space Telescope — seemingly confirmed the
widespread belief that early galaxies were chaotic, haphazard places. The JWST,
however, appears to show that those findings were an illusion based on that
Hubble's limited capabilities.
"We thought the early universe was this chaotic place
where there's all these clumps of star formation, and things are all
a-jumble," the Space Telescope Science Institute's Dan Coe told WaPo,
adding later that, before the JWST was launched into orbit, Hubble's imagery
was "missing all the colder stars and the older stars. We were really only
seeing the hot young ones."
Time Machine
While these findings have taken the scientific community by
surprise, they're not at all a cause for alarm. Major technological
advancements, in astronomy and beyond, have a long history of leading to
periods of large-scale scientific discovery. Right now, it really feels like
we're in one of those watershed moments, and the discoveries made today may
well lay the foundation for future breakthroughs, even if they're decades down
the line.
And really, discoveries like this mean that the JWST is
doing exactly what scientists want it to do — it's revealing new, exciting
stuff about our mind-bogglingly expansive universe, answering old questions and
asking new ones along the way.