JWST State of the Universe Address

The universe is not
what cosmologists expected

How has the James Webb Space Telescope changed cosmology? (22 Oct 2024, BigThink.com). Dr Ethan Siegel reviews highlights of findings by the JWST. Notice the 9 times he mentions things that were expected vs unexpected. Given things that were “wholly” unexpected, and how many things were unknown prior to JWST, readers might be skeptical about what they think they know now, given that cosmologists have no clue about what dark matter and dark energy are, and “the Hubble tension and the mystery over the expanding Universe is just as strong as ever.”

UT Astronomers Find JWST Data Conflicts with Reionization Models (10 Oct 2024, Univ of Texas at Austin). “Established theories state that this epoch ended around 1 billion years after the Big Bang,” this press release begins. “However, if calculating this milestone using observations from the James Webb Space Telescope, Reionization would have ended at least 350 million years earlier than expected.” JWST is “challenging current models,” it goes on to say, and its finding “is counter to what many people anticipated.”

The earliest galaxies formed amazingly fast after the Big Bang. Do they break the universe or change its age? (3 Oct 2024, The Conversation). Sandro Tacchella of the Kavli Institute shares more anomalies from the JWST that threaten current theories.

The surprising findings from JWST of bright galaxies at high redshifts, or distances, could imply that these galaxies matured faster than expected after the Big Bang. This is important because it would challenge existing models of galaxy formation. The constant star-formation efficiency model described above, while effective at explaining much of what we see, struggles to account for the large number of bright and distant galaxies observed with a redshift of more than ten with a redshift of more than ten [sic].

It’s not a pleasing solution, however, to just tweak rates, like saying “star formation in the early universe may have been more intense or ‘bursty’ than previously thought….” This is like the evolutionary biologists who tweak the rate of natural selection to account for gaps and bursts in the fossil record.

The universe is smoother than the standard model of cosmology suggests – so is the theory broken? (26 Sept 2024, The Conversation). Astronomer Ian G. McCarthy doesn’t know if current big bang models can survive, or if it is time to start over. He’s excited about the possibility of being wrong.

It may be that within the next couple of years we will have ruled out the standard model of cosmology and profoundly changed our understanding of how the universe works. Or the model may be vindicated and more reliable than ever. It’s an exciting time to be a cosmologist.

How much of what cosmologists have been telling us over the last century is right? If the “standard model” (i.e., the consensus view) gets “ruled out” then how good would have been “our understanding of how the universe works” all this time?

These links are offered to interested readers for pondering and researching further. It is risky for certain theists to place all their cards on the “standard model” for interpreting Genesis. If God used unique creative processes to bring the universe into being, one cannot expect to understand the universe by applying “standard models” that are, by nature, oblivious to creative processes. Why ignore what the only Eyewitness told us He did?