JWST Finds Un-Big-Banged Galaxies
Astronomers were surprised to find
disk galaxies older than they should be
According to the Big Bang theory, it was supposed to take a long time for the first stars to form, and then for the first mature galaxies to take shape. Cosmologists expected the first galaxies to be irregular clumps of pure hydrogen stars that blew up after millions of years to form heavy elements. The next generation stars were supposed to eventually coalesce into mature disk galaxies like the Milky Way. Those in turn—after long ages—evolved into elliptical galaxies, the story goes. Here’s what they found instead. Notice the exclamations of surprise.
JWST spots some of the most distant galaxies ever seen (Nature News, 17 Nov 2022).
Researchers still need to confirm the distances of these galaxies by analysing the spectral properties of their light. But if initial estimates are correct, light from these objects has travelled such great distances that they appear as they did just 350 million to 450 million years after the Big Bang. Along with other recent JWST findings, these observations indicate that galaxies formed and evolved earlier in the Universe’s history than astronomers had been able to probe until now.
“It’s been a bit of a surprise that there are so many that formed so early,” says Jeyhan Kartaltepe, an astronomer at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. And that is challenging notions of how galaxies formed early in the Universe, she says.
Webb draws back curtain on Universe’s early galaxies (European Space Agency, 17 Nov 2022).
Researchers have found two exceptionally bright galaxies that existed approximately 300 and 400 million years after the Big Bang. Their extreme brightness is puzzling to astronomers.
The young galaxies are transforming gas into stars as fast as they can and they appear compacted into spherical or disc shapes that are much smaller than our Milky Way galaxy. The onset of stellar birth may have been just 100 million years after the Big Bang, which happened 13.8 billion years ago.
Yes, those galaxies were working fast and hard, staying overtime to get the job done. Wait; do galaxies have minds with intentions? Or have these reporters personified them in order to rescue the Big Bang theory from unexpected findings?
NASA’s Webb Draws Back Curtain on Universe’s Early Galaxies (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, 17 Nov 2022).
“These observations just make your head explode. This is a whole new chapter in astronomy. It’s like an archaeological dig, and suddenly you find a lost city or something you didn’t know about. It’s just staggering,” added Paola Santini, fourth author of the Castellano et al. GLASS-JWST paper.
“While the distances of these early sources still need to be confirmed with spectroscopy, their extreme brightnesses are a real puzzle, challenging our understanding of galaxy formation,” noted Pascal Oesch at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, second author of the Naidu et al. paper….
Erica Nelson of the University of Colorado, a member of the Naidu/Oesch team, noted that “our team was struck by being able to measure the shapes of these first galaxies; their calm, orderly disks question our understanding of how the first galaxies formed in the crowded, chaotic early universe.”
Why are they puzzled? Why are they surprised? Because they expected a different picture. The evidence “is challenging notions” of their theories. Notions are not science. They are aspects of a worldview.
James Webb Telescope’s First Deep Field image, July 2022.
Creationists Were Not Surprised
Last month (4 Oct 2022) in his Creation Astronomy blog, Spike Psarris told about this long-standing trend of “early maturity”—disk galaxies being found closer and closer to the supposed date of the big bang. In his earlier DVD about the big bang, Our Created Universe, Psarris gave example after example of redshifts from the Hubble Space Telescope showing galaxies farther back in time. Now, the JWST has exacerbated that headache for theorists:
They were too dim to be seen with other telescopes, but they are visible to the JW. In the images above, there are many examples of this. Look at all the galaxies in the JW photo that aren’t apparent in the Hubble photo.
And a surprising number of these newly-discovered galaxies aren’t irregulars or peculiars. They’re disk galaxies.
Furthermore, some of the galaxies that were previously thought to be irregulars, are now (due to the better images) shown to be disks instead.
In fact, according to this study of a previously-studied region … there are ten times as many disk galaxies there as was previously thought. About half of the galaxies observed are disks.
This is a huge “lumpiness problem” for materialistic cosmologies (15 June 2021), as well as a time problem. It amounts to a refutation of the stated expectations of the theory.
We have been reporting on this “early maturity” theme for nearly two decades (18 Nov 2015, 18 Aug 2006, etc.; search on “early maturity” or “lumpiness problem”). Complex, mature stars and galaxies show up far “earlier than thought” repeatedly. It mirrors the same trend in planetary origins: “disk instability” theories that create almost instant planets (15 Aug 2015, 21 March 2006), and an impact that created our moon in possibly one day (4 Oct 2022). It also mirrors the same trend in biology: explosive appearance of complexity, giving Darwin far less time to work his magic through “slow and gradual” mutations and natural selection.
One might even think the evidence seems to support creation.
Note: If God’s purpose was for the stars to be visible on Day 4 of creation week to show his glory (Psalm 19:1), could he have gotten the light to Adam’s retinas in time? Read this.
Graphic by David Coppedge