James Webb Space Telescope spots huge galaxies that 'should not exist'

They should not have had time to form, says astrophysicist

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  Uranus is surrounded by 13 rings and 27 small moons as it rotates at a nearly 90-degree angle from the plane of its orbit. Photo: Nasa

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  Complex organic molecules similar to smoke or smog in a galaxy more than 12 billion light-years from Earth. Photo: Nasa

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  A delicate image of dust structures and bright star clusters taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. Photo: Nasa

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  Saturn has seven rings with several gaps and divisions between them, as well as 53 known moons. Photo: Nasa

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  Star cluster NGC 346, spiral galaxies NGC 1672 and Messier 74, and the Pillars of Creation, towering tendrils of cosmic dust and gas at the heart of the Eagle Nebula. Photo: Nasa

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  An infrared image of Neptune, the only planet in our solar system not visible to the naked eye. Photo: Nasa

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  Every eight years, the two stars in this image are brought together by their orbits – creating colliding streams of gas that, under the right conditions, form a new ring of dust. Photo: Nasa

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  A part of the Orion Nebula known as the Orion Bar. Photo: Nasa

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  A crowded field of galaxies, along with stars crowned with the James Webb Space Telescope's signature six-pointed diffraction spikes. Photo: Nasa

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  The NGC 3256 spiral galaxy was formed after a collision of two massive galaxies about 500 million years ago. Photo: Nasa

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  The Wolf-Rayet 124 star, featured in an image combining near-infrared and mid-infrared wavelengths of light. Photo: Nasa

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  An hourglass-shaped cloud of dust and gas is illuminated by light from a protostar. Photo: Nasa

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  Two views of the Southern Ring Nebula, which show the planetary nebula as a misshapen oval. Photo: Nasa

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  A composite image of the Cartwheel Galaxy captured by the James Webb Space Telescope in August 2022. AFP

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  A cluster of stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud, near the Milky Way. Photo: JWST

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  A colour composite image of the Messier 74 galaxy. Photo: JWST

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  The gravity of galaxy cluster MACS0647 bends and magnifies light from the more distant MACS0647-JD. Photo: Nasa

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  The 'Pillars of Creation' — clouds of hydrogen gas and dust 6,500 light years from Earth — captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, left, and James Webb Space Telescope. AP

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  Dust rings resembling a fingerprint created by a rare type of star and its companion. PA

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  Images of the asteroid Dimorphos hours after Nasa crashed a spacecraft into it in September 2022. EPA

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  Neptune and seven of its 14 known moons. AFP

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  Thousands of young stars in a stellar nursery called the Tarantula Nebula. Photo: Nasa

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  A image of an exoplanet — a gas giant with no rocky surface. Photo: Nasa, ESA and CSA

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  Glass-z13, the oldest galaxy to be detected, was formed about 300 million years after the Big Bang. Photo: JWST

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  Jupiter and its moon Europa. Photo: Nasa

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  Jupiter and its moons Europa, Thebe and Metis. Photo: Nasa

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  Another image of Jupiter and some of its 79 moons. Photo: Nasa

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  An image of galaxy cluster Smacs 0723 taken by the James Webb telescope. Photo: Nasa

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  Stephan’s Quintet is an area in space that has five galaxies. Photo: JWST

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  The 'Cosmic Cliffs' of the Carina Nebula. Photo: JWST

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  An anniversary image shows the birth of a star in the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth. Photo: Nasa

Six huge galaxies so massive that scientists say they should not be able to exist have been spotted by Nasa's James Webb Space Telescope.

An international team of astrophysicists discovered the mysterious objects during a study at the University of Colorado Boulder in America.

Each may have existed at the dawn of the universe more than 13 billion years ago, about 500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang, the team found.

They contain almost as many stars as the Milky Way.

“It’s bananas,” said Erica Nelson, co-author of the research and an assistant professor of astrophysics at the university.

“You just don’t expect the early universe to be able to organise itself that quickly. These galaxies should not have had time to form.”

The findings were published in the journal Nature on February 22.

Images of six candidate massive galaxies, seen 540 million to 770 million years after the Big Bang, based on observations by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. Swinburne University of Technology/Reuters

The James Webb Space Telescope, launched in December 2021, is the most powerful ever sent into space.

Its latest finds are not the earliest galaxies that have been observed.

In 2022, a team spotted four galaxies they said formed from gas about 350 million years after the Big Bang.

Those objects were tiny compared with the new galaxies.

Ms Nelson said it was possible the galaxies are “a different kind of weird object, such as faint quasars, which would be just as interesting”.

Ms Nelson and her colleagues from the US, Australia, Denmark and Spain formed a team to investigate data sent back to Earth by the telescope.

She was looking at a postage stamp-sized section of one image when she spotted “fuzzy dots” of light that she said looked too bright to be real.

“They were so red and so bright,” she said. “We weren’t expecting to see them.”

The team discovered that the old galaxies contained tens to hundreds of billions of sun-sized stars' worth of mass, similar to Earth’s own Milky Way galaxy, though the galaxies probably had little in common.

“The Milky Way forms about one to two new stars every year,” Ms Nelson said. “Some of these galaxies would have to be forming hundreds of new stars a year for the entire history of the universe.”

Calculations suggest there should not have been enough normal matter to form so many stars so quickly at the time.

“If even one of these galaxies is real, it will push against the limits of our understanding of cosmology,” she said.

What is the James Webb Space Telescope?

The James Webb Space Telescope is the largest optical telescope in space, equipped with high-resolution and high-sensitivity instruments to conduct infrared astronomy, allowing objects that were previously too old or far away to be seen.

Among its discoveries, an image beamed back to Earth from the telescope in January 2022 offered clues on how the first stars were born.

Astronomers believe the image shows a young cluster of stars more than 200,000 light years from Earth, in a dwarf galaxy called the Small Magellanic Cloud, could help shed light on how the first stars formed during the “cosmic noon” period, about two or three billion years after the Big Bang.

That same month, it found an Earth-like exoplanet outside the solar system. The planet, called LHS 475 b, is almost exactly the same size as the Earth.