James Webb Space Telescope

The James Webb Space Telescope, performing splendidly as it examines the universe, has got astronomers scratching their heads. The very distant universe looks a little different than expected.

The telescope, launched eight months ago and orbiting the sun about a million miles from Earth, has been capturing images of extremely faint galaxies that emitted their light in the first billion years or so after the big bang. Observing these “early” galaxies is one of the main missions of the telescope — to see deeper into space, and further back in time, than any previous telescope.

The first scientific results have emerged in recent weeks, and what the telescope has seen in deepest space is a little puzzling. Some of those distant galaxies are strikingly massive. A general assumption had been that early galaxies — which formed not long after the first stars ignited — would be relatively small and misshapen. Instead, some of them are big, bright and nicely structured.

“The models just don’t predict this,” Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California at Santa Cruz, said of the massive early galaxies. “How do you do this in the universe at such an early time? How do you form so many stars so quickly?”

This isn’t a cosmological crisis. What’s happening is a lot of fast science, conducted “in real time,” as astrophysicist Jeyhan Kartaltepe of the Rochester Institute of Technology puts it. Data from the new telescope is gushing forth, and she is among the legions of astronomers who are spinning out new papers, posting them quickly online in advance of peer review..........

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