James Webb Just Discovered Galaxies That Shouldn't Exist | Brian Greene

Описание: That's what astronomer Erica Nelson at the University of Colorado said when she first saw James Webb's data. And she's right. Because what Webb has found in just a few years of operation isn't just surprising—it's genuinely breaking our best model of how the universe works.

Webb has discovered galaxies that, according to everything we understand about cosmology, should not exist. Galaxies so massive, so ancient, so fully formed in the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang that physicists are scrambling to explain them.

And the discoveries keep coming.

🔹 WHAT WEBB ACTUALLY FOUND:

The Six Impossible Galaxies (2023)
In Webb's very first images, a team led by Ivo Labbé at Swinburne University identified six fuzzy dots of light existing just 500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang—when the universe was barely 4% of its current age. These galaxies already contained almost as many stars as our Milky Way, which has been building itself for over 13 billion years. According to our standard model, this is impossible.

The Red Monsters (2024)
Mengyuan Xiao at the University of Geneva led a team that found three enormous galaxies—called "red monsters"—converting gas into stars at nearly 100% efficiency. Standard galaxy formation allows 10-20% efficiency over billions of years. These galaxies did it in a fraction of the time. The physics simply doesn't allow it. And yet, there they are.

300 Mysterious Objects (2025)
Haojing Yan at the University of Missouri announced the discovery of 300 more anomalous objects—all shining more brightly than they should, existing earlier than our models allow. His conclusion: "Even if only a few are confirmed, they will force us to modify existing theories of galaxy formation."

The Little Red Dots
Webb keeps finding tiny, extremely red objects that are too luminous to be normal galaxies. In September 2025, astronomers proposed they might be "black hole stars"—an entirely new class of astronomical object that our current physics doesn't accommodate. Not a galaxy. Not just a black hole. Something else entirely.

The Sleeping Beauties
Webb found dormant galaxies—galaxies that had already stopped forming stars—in the early universe. Like finding a six-month-old baby who has already retired from a 40-year career. At an age when the universe itself was young, these galaxies were somehow already done.

1,000 Milky Way Lookalikes
Leonardo Ferreira at the University of Victoria found that disk galaxies with spiral arms—like our own Milky Way—are 10 times more common in the early universe than expected. In an era when violent mergers should have made such fragile structures impossible.

🔹 WHY THIS MATTERS:

Our standard cosmological model—called Lambda-CDM—is one of the most successful theories in all of science. It correctly predicts the large-scale structure of the universe, the cosmic microwave background, the distribution of galaxies across cosmic time. It's been tested and confirmed for decades.

And Webb is finding things it didn't predict.

This doesn't mean everything is wrong. But it does mean something significant: our model is incomplete. The early universe is more complex, more structured, more surprising than we expected.

🔹 THE LEADING EXPLANATIONS:

We walk through all the serious scientific proposals:

Population III Stars — Did unusual stellar populations make early galaxies look more massive than they are?
Modified Dark Matter — Does dark matter behave differently in the early universe, allowing faster structure formation?
Unusual Inflation — Did the Big Bang leave behind stronger density fluctuations that created bigger seeds?
Bursty Star Formation — Brief, intense bursts of star formation could explain the extreme luminosities
Early Supermassive Black Holes — Webb found black holes that are too large too early, and they might be accelerating galaxy formation
The Hubble Tension Connection — Is there new physics affecting cosmic expansion itself?

🔹 WHAT HAPPENS NEXT:

The COSMOS-Web survey is building a statistical census of early galaxies. ALMA is combining with Webb for multi-wavelength views of the same objects. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches late this decade to survey millions of galaxies. The Extremely Large Telescope—with a 40-meter mirror—will analyze chemical compositions in unprecedented detail.

Every month, new spectroscopic confirmations are coming in. And every month, the picture gets clearer—and stranger.

🔹 WHY IT MATTERS FOR YOU:

Every atom in your body—except hydrogen—was forged in a star. The calcium in your bones, the iron in your blood, the oxygen you breathe—all created in stellar interiors and scattered when those stars exploded.

Understanding how galaxies formed isn't abstract cosmology. It's your origin story. And if galaxies formed faster than we thought—if heavy elements existed earlier than we believed—then life might have been possible billions of years before Earth existed.