The James Webb has just detected 300 objects that nobody knew were there. A group of researchers from the University of Missouri has identified 300 objects in the early universe that shine much brighter than expected. And we are not talking about a small deviation, if confirmed, we could be talking about some of the first galaxies that formed after the Big Bang.
And yes, it is only physics, through the James Webb you can see the past! So scientists now want to know if what we know about the formation of early galaxies is right or not.
When the light doesn’t match
This discovery has been thanks to the infrared spectrum of the James Webb, it has shown something they call “cosmic detective work”. The mystery? That these objects should not be there. Or at least, not that early in the history of the universe.
The key is in their brightness and the famous “redshift”. The higher that redshift, the farther away the object is… and the further back in time we are seeing it. And these 300 objects are, literally, brushing against the first moments of the cosmos. And even if it is complicated to understand, we must know that light in the cosmos travels in light-years, that means that what we now see with the James Webb happened thousands and millions of years ago, it is like looking back into the past.
And what exactly has it found?
The objects detected by Webb are so bright that they don’t fit with any current prediction about how the universe was supposed to evolve back then. To give you an idea, Professor Haojing Yan (one of the authors of the study) believes that even if only a part of those objects were really early galaxies, it would already be enough to make many of today’s theories outdated!
All this has been published in the Astrophysical Journal, and if there is no error involved, we would be looking at the strangest and oldest galaxies ever detected.
What is redshift?
We explain it, that’s what we’re here for! When light travels for billions of years, its waves stretch. Like a rubber band. That light that originally we could see with our eyes, shifts to the infrared. And Webb is a specialist at capturing infrared, that’s why we can see the objects that are light-years away… and also light-years old.
The deniers
Obviously, this kind of finding goes viral! Some astronomers think that those objects might not be galaxies, but something else,something we still don’t fully identify. But the Missouri team defends their data, they insist that what they have captured with the NIRCam instrument is solid and deserves attention. A lot.
Why does this matter?
Because if it turns out that those 300 objects are really galaxies formed that early, the entire current theory about how the universe was organized would blow up. We would be talking about complex structures being born much earlier than anyone imagined possible.
And beyond the fights between scientists, what is clear is that there is something strange out there. And that we still don’t know even a tiny part of what is happening (or happened) at the edges of the known universe.
A telescope that never stops surprising
The James Webb was built to see farther and further back than any other instrument. But it is doing more than that: it is dismantling certainties. The 300 mysterious objects it has just captured are not only an enigma. They are a wake-up call. That there is still much to discover. And that the universe has more plot twists than any science fiction series.