DID THE JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE JUST SPOT GALAXIES THAT SHOULDN'T EXIST?

Given the age of the Universe, the galaxies we've just been shown appear to be too old. So, what's gone wrong?

- DA ARTIE MACH

If you've ever looked over at a shockingly productive colleague and asked, "How do you find the time?", then you'll know how cosmologists are currently feeling about the early Universe.

Since it started sending back data in mid-2022, the internationally funded, state-of-the-art James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been giving us images of distant galaxies that appear to have formed and matured far earlier than our models predicted.

Researchers have likened the situation to flipping through someone's family photo album expecting to find baby pictures and seeing a full-grown adult instead. With a person, you might just conclude that they're older than you thought. But with early galaxies, you quickly run into a problem with the age of the Universe.

JWST is looking at galaxies that are so distant that their light has taken more than 13 billion years to reach us. If the Universe is, as we currently think, 13.7 billion years old, there wouldn't have been enough time for such massive galaxies to have formed.

Headlines have been calling this a crisis for cosmology and a threat to the Big Bang theory. But before we throw out all our cosmology textbooks, let's dig a little deeper into the data.