Looking at objects far away in the universe is like looking back in time; A very useful consequence of limiting the speed of light. Therefore, very distant objects are very young objects, such as when the universe was young. Imagine the surprise of astronomers who found a very distant galaxy that appeared to be quite old.

It is known as ZF-UDS-7329. Observations showed that the galaxy’s light appeared 11.5 billion years ago, and its huge stellar population already existed 13 billion years ago. The mass of all stars in this galaxy is at least twice the mass of stars in our Milky Way galaxy. And it took billions of years for our galaxy to grow this much. How the galaxy grew so much in just a few hundred million years remains a mystery.

“We are now going beyond what is possible to confirm the oldest giant resident monsters that existed deep within the universe. This pushes the boundaries of our current understanding of how galaxies form and evolve. The big question now is how they formed so quickly at such an early stage. Find out what the mysterious mechanisms are that cause star formation to suddenly stop when the rest disappears. [це] Co-author Dr. from Swinburne University of Technology. Temiya Nanayakkara said in a statement.

The galaxy was first identified several years ago, but its truly extraordinary features could not be recorded by ground-based observatories. Only with JWST’s keen eye could astronomers get this right. While in space, it is not affected by the limitations imposed by our atmosphere.

“We’ve been tracking this particular galaxy for seven years and spent hours observing it with two of the largest telescopes in the world to find out how old it was. But it was so red and faint we couldn’t measure it. We eventually had to fly away from Earth and use JWST to confirm its nature,” added lead author Professor Karl Glazebrook, also from Swinburne.

“It’s been very much a team effort, from the infrared sky surveys we started in 2010 to identifying this galaxy as unusual, to the long hours we spent at Keck and the Very Large Telescope, where we tried but ultimately couldn’t confirm it. Last year it was a team effort to figure out how to process the JWST data and how this spectrum “We put a lot of effort into understanding how to analyze it.”

Although this is a single object, the results, combined with other unusual discoveries, continue to point to the early universe being more complex than previously thought. This may depend on how dark matter is collected. Galaxies form in the gravitational wells of these primordial dark matter halos. Or perhaps there are processes in the evolution of galaxies that we do not yet understand.

“Galaxy formation is largely determined by how dark matter condenses,” said Associate Professor Claudia Lagos from the University of Western Australia. “The existence of these extremely massive galaxies at such an early stage in the universe poses significant challenges to our Standard Model of Cosmology. This is because we do not think that the massive dark matter structures containing these massive galaxies have yet formed.”

“More observations are needed to understand how common these galaxies may be and to help us understand how large these galaxies really are.”