WRONG THING, WRONG PLACE, WRONG TIME

Some of the first images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope included a group of unidentifiable objects in deep space. The objects were so unusual, they threatened to break our understanding of the cosmos. Now, astronomers think they might be getting to grips with what the objects could be

- by GEORGINA TORBET

The problems started with six little red dots. Six small fuzzy spots, among thousands of others, were enough to suddenly bring everything into question.

The dots appeared in images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and, whichever way astronomers and astrophysicists looked at them, they just didn’t make sense. Everything about the dots seemed wrong – their colour, the wavelengths of light they were giving off and the fact they were so numerous. Their existence didn’t fit into our understanding of the Universe.

And yet, there they were. Six little dots, sitting – as plain as the nose on your face – right in the middle of images collected by the most advanced telescope humanity had ever built. A telescope with the ability to look so far into space that it can effectively see back in time, almost to the dawn of the Universe.

There were only three possible explanations for the existence of these six troubling dots. One, there was a problem with the telescope; two, there was a problem with the experts’ interpretations of the data; or three, there was a problem with our understanding of the cosmos.

TOO MASSIVE TO MAKE SENSE

It was Dr Ivo Labbé, an associate professor of astrophysics at the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, and his colleagues who first spotted the curious dots and began investigating them. And the closer they looked, the more puzzling the dots became.

The dots appeared to be six massive galaxies – far too massive to make any sense.

The galaxies were more massive than could be explained by the amount of gas available in the Universe at the time they formed. By our understanding, it just wasn’t possible for galaxies so massive to exist at such an early time. And yet there they were, in images from the JWST, blissfully unaware of the fact they were contradicting everything we thought we knew about the cosmos.