The James Webb telescope photographed six large galaxies of the early universe

Astronomers have identified six super-large galaxies in the early universe using the James Webb telescope. This was reported by the press service of the Pennsylvania State University.

The James Webb Infrared Telescope was launched into orbit at the end of 2021. One of its main goals was to observe the young universe: due to the quality of its optics, the telescope can see objects many billions of light years away. Due to this, the device opens a “window into the past” for astronomers and allows you to restore the chronology of the evolution of galaxies.

It is believed that the first galaxies appeared 300-400 million years after the Big Bang. For a long time, scientists believed that at that time they were small and grew slowly, but observations of recent decades have shown that this is not so – large galaxies existed already in the first billion years of the existence of the universe, with its total age of 13.8 billion years.

Astronomers have been able to see galaxies more than 13.1 billion light-years away from Earth in new James Webb images. They are observed in the state they were in 500-750 million years after the Big Bang.

To the surprise of astronomers, they were able to detect six large galaxies in the James Webb images at once, whose mass exceeded the solar mass by about 100 billion times. This makes them comparable in size to the Milky Way, as well as the Andromeda and Whirlpool galaxies, relatively large spiral galaxies of the modern Universe.

These observations run counter to most modern cosmological models, which will probably require their radical revision.