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Not long after the James Webb Space Telescope came online in 2022, astronomers’ jaws hit the floor.
“I remember thinking, This just can’t be right!” says Mike Boylan-Kolchin, a University of Texas Austin astronomer.
The observations he’s referring to would, to you and me, seem like little smudgy red blobs among a field of other smudges and blobs. But in his eyes, they represented a potential challenge to the story scientists have painstakingly constructed about the formative years of our universe.
That is, some time after the Big Bang, around 12-plus billion years ago, when the universe went from a dark, diffuse place full of gas to a light-filled universe populated by stars and galaxies. This is the era that laid the foundation for everything to come — including our solar system, and you and me.
Scientists had some theories about what happened during this crucial period, but the new telescope put them to the test by observing regions of space humans have never seen before.
And if the observations were correct, Boylan-Kolchin thought, “everything we know about cosmology is wrong at some level.” Cosmology is the study of how our universe evolved from the earliest times onward. So, the potential to be wrong about it “was pretty unpalatable,” he says.
Boylan-Kolchin was agog, but not alone in his thoughts. “I cannot even get across how mind-boggling the past year has been of looking at JWST [James Webb Space Telescope] data,” says Caitlin Casey, also an astronomer at UT Austin. “We have been seeing all sorts of wild, wild things in the early universe.”
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