Astronomers spotted something perplexing near the beginning of time [View all]
Not long after the James Webb Space Telescope came online in 2022, astronomers jaws hit the floor.
I remember thinking, This just cant be right! says Mike Boylan-Kolchin, a University of Texas Austin astronomer.
The observations hes referring to would, to you and me, seem like little smudgy red blobs among a field of other smudges and blobs. But in his eyes, they represented a potential challenge to the story scientists have painstakingly constructed about the formative years of our universe.
That is, some time after the Big Bang, around 12-plus billion years ago, when the universe went from a dark, diffuse place full of gas to a light-filled universe populated by stars and galaxies. This is the era that laid the foundation for everything to come including our solar system, and you and me.
Scientists had some theories about what happened during this crucial period, but the new telescope put them to the test by observing regions of space humans have never seen before.
https://www.vox.com/science/24040534/jwst-galaxies-big-bright-mystery-black-holes-cosmology
Guess what...we don't know everything after all!