According to the first observations of the new James Webb Space Telescope, the first galaxies may have formed earlier than astronomers thought, which in just a few months shook the scientific understanding of the cosmos, reports AFP.

“Somehow, the universe managed to form galaxies faster and earlier than we thought,” UCLA astronomy professor Tommaso Treu said at a news conference Thursday.

One of the main missions of the James Webb telescope, which is now in its fifth month, is to study the first galaxies formed after the Big Bang, which occurred 13.8 billion years ago.

Based on cosmological models developed, scientists believed it would “take a long time” to find them, said astrophysicist Ceyhan Kartaltepe.

But in just a few months, James Webb has already identified many galaxies of this type, including galaxies that existed only 350 million years after the Big Bang, which is 50 million behind the previous record.

“So many stars formed in such a short time”

“It’s surprising that so many of them formed so early,” commented Ceyhan Kartaltepe.

In addition to their number, scientists were struck by one thing: their high luminosity.

“The immediate conclusion is that they are massive, which raises a real puzzle: how they could form so many stars in such a short time,” summarized Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

For this, “these galaxies would have to start forming probably only 100 million years after the Big Bang,” he explained.

An alternative hypothesis is that these galaxies actually contain so-called Population III stars, which are very different from what we know. These first, extremely bright stars were so far only theories, not observations.

The incredible capabilities of the James Webb Telescope also revealed the appearance of some of these galaxies.

“Our team was thrilled to be able to measure the shape of these early galaxies,” Erica Nelson of the University of Colorado said in a NASA statement.

“Their quiet, ordered disks challenge our understanding of how the first galaxies formed in the young and chaotic universe,” she says.

The exact distance to these young galaxies, including the one that broke the record, will need to be confirmed in the future with spectroscopic analysis, also carried out by James Webb.

But in any case, with this new observatory, “we’re well on our way to realizing this dream of learning about early galaxies,” Garth Illingworth said excitedly.