We Found Galaxies Too Old for the Universe

We Found Galaxies Too Old for the Universe

The James Webb Space Telescope found galaxies that are too ancient-looking for our young universe. You may have heard that, but it keeps finding them, and our recent efforts to solve this conundrum point in wildly different directions. Have we found galaxies older than the universe, or did we just learn something incredible about how galaxies form?

The universe is significantly older than previously thought, astronomers find

Galaxies spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope have been causing trouble for the standard story of cosmic history. Some appear bright, massive, and oddly compact at a time when the universe, under the usual model, should have been only a few hundred million years old. That leaves very little time for such mature systems to form. A study by University of Ottawa physicist Rajendra Gupta argues that the mismatch may not lie in the galaxies at a…