Even 10 years ago, it was believed that 300 million years after the Big Bang, the universe was dark and had no galaxies in it. However, in 2024, a galaxy that is less than 300 million years old was discovered in the Peach constellation. In an effort to save modern models of galaxy evolution, some scientists suggested that the source of the galaxy’s brightness was not stars, but a supermassive black hole. However, researchers have now shown that everything is different and our ideas about the history of the universe are, to put it mildly, incomplete.

Immediately after the Big Bang, the universe was composed of ionized gas. After 370 thousand years, it cooled, hydrogen became neutral, and hundreds of millions of years later, stars and galaxies formed from it. At least, that’s how astronomers imagined it 10-20 years ago.

In recent years, researchers have discovered increasingly distant and old galaxies. In 2024, the James Webb Space Telescope discovered the galaxy JADES-GS-ZZ14-0. Now scientists have performed their spectroscopic analysis and confirmed the initial estimates: The galaxy has a redshift corresponding to an age of 290 million years. It is the oldest galaxy known today and an unexpectedly large galaxy. As the authors of a new scientific article published in the journal Nature its brilliance has an unexpected source.

Current models of galaxy evolution do not allow galaxies of the first hundreds of millions of years of the history of the universe to have a large total stellar luminosity. This is due to the fact that too little time has passed since the dark ages – the necessary number of luminaries did not have time to form. Therefore, after the discovery of objects of the JADES-GS-ZZ14-0 type, some scientists assumed that its luminosity is radiation from hot gas falling into a supermassive black hole at the center of such galaxies.

This explanation also raises the question: How could supermassive black holes have gained mass over the course of 290 million years? Some theorists have suggested that supermassive black holes may have formed from some “primordial” black holes created by quantum fluctuations shortly after the Big Bang. Other theorists rightly point out the many weaknesses in such assumptions.

In any case, the “shifting of responsibility” for the high luminosity of the first galaxies on the outskirts of black holes has eased the seriousness of the problem. If it is possible to invent at least some explanation for the excessive early growth of the BH, then the mass formation of stars 290 million years ago cannot yet be explained by any generally accepted cosmological model.

However, the new study on JADES-GS-ZZ14-0 is inconsistent with the claim that the brightness of the oldest galaxy is caused by a black hole. It showed that the decrease in the radiation power of JADES-GS-ZZ14-0 with increasing wavelengths is quite sharp. This is possible only if the source of the object’s brightness is mainly ordinary stars, as in our Galaxy. The brightly emitting neighborhoods of supermassive black holes have a completely different distribution of the radiation spectrum.

This is evidenced by the size of the galaxy: its visible disk has a diameter of 1,700 light-years. The outskirts of the Black Forest are not enough to illuminate such a large area. The authors of the new study concluded that JADES-GS-ZZ14-0 clearly shows that there were bright large galaxies 300 million years after the Big Bang. And their stars began to form en masse 100 million years before that. And the total number of such galaxies in the early Universe is at least 10 times greater than the estimates that existed before the launch of the James Webb Orbital Observatory.