The James Webb Space Telescope continues to challenge our best models of the evolution of the universe, with its incredible ability to see space and time more than ever before. Several “impossible” giant galaxies have been discovered that contain more mass than was thought to exist in the entire universe at the time. Since the speed of light in vacuum is constant, we observe objects in space with a delay. The sun is eight light minutes away, so we see it as it was eight minutes ago. The next closest star, Alpha Centauri, is about four light-years away, so we see it four years behind.

If you extend this principle to the deepest reaches of space, you can literally go back billions of years and see how galaxies have evolved over the lifetime of the universe. And thanks to the unprecedented power of the James Webb Space Telescope, we can now see the beginning of time closer than ever before, in sharper detail. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this means that we continue to find things that contradict our current understanding of the early universe. A recent study by James Webb found that barred spiral galaxies – with an advanced structure like our Milky Way – existed billions of years earlier than previously thought possible.

Now the telescope has discovered new species that should have been impossible according to our current models. A team of astronomers led by the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia has observed six galaxies that are much larger than previously thought possible. In fact, they have a greater mass than was believed to have the entire universe at the time.

“The six galaxies we found reach sizes more than 12 billion years old and 100 billion times the mass of our Sun, just 500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang,” said Ivo Labbe, lead researcher of the study. “It’s too big to exist in current models. This discovery could revolutionize our understanding of how the earliest galaxies in our universe formed.”

Measurements need to be tracked with follow-up observations to verify audiences and their location. The team says alternative explanations are still possible, but these alone could lead to entirely new discoveries.

“A no less exciting alternative is that some objects belong to a new class of supermassive black holes that didn’t exist before,” Labbe said. Said.