The James Webb Space Telescope is an infrared observatory that can peer at those regions of the cosmos that even Hubble could not. Webb's long-awaited first year of science observations, known as cycle 1, began by mid-2022. Two of its Cycle 1 programs spent dozens of hours looking for distant galaxies in the early Universe by staring at separate small portions of the sky.
Astronomers did not expect anything remarkable. They thought they would get a refined version of the Hubble Deep Field from these two short-period Cycle 1 programs. Instead, to their surprise, such galaxies sprung into view immediately. Astronomers began spotting galaxies that must have existed in the first 200 million years of the big bang. The researchers were excited because Webb suddenly opened the windows to the last significant unexplored era in the history of the Universe.
However, those galaxies were not like what we had expected. Instead, they were exceptionally bright with a stellar mass of billions of solar masses. Such giant evolved galaxies defy the expectations set by our standard model of the Universe's evolution. So, where did we go wrong in our models? How can we explain the new extragalactic observations made by the James Webb Space Telescope? Finally, and most importantly, do these observations mean the Big Bang theory is wrong?
The 26th episode of the Sunday Discovery Series answers all these questions in detail.
