Launched on Christmas of 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope (or JWST for short) is a big fancy space telescope that is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. The James Webb Space Telescope can see farther into distant space than any other telescope. Scientists believe that when a telescope like this looks at the farthest reaches of its limits, it is actually looking far back in time. That's because light travels at a speed of one light-year per year. So if a telescope such as the James Webb Space Telescope observes a very distant galaxy about 13 billion light-years away, that light should be the light the galaxy emitted 13 billion years ago.
A news story is entitled "SCIENTISTS PUZZLED BECAUSE JAMES WEBB IS SEEING STUFF THAT SHOULDN'T BE THERE." We read this:
"For a long time, for instance, scientists believed the universe's earliest, oldest galaxies to be small, slightly chaotic, and misshapen systems. But according to the Washington Post, JWST-captured imagery has revealed those galaxies to be shockingly massive, not to mention balanced and well-formed — a finding that challenges, and will likely rewrite, long-held understandings about the origins of our universe. 'The models just don't predict this,' Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California at Santa Cruz, told WaPo. 'How do you do this in the universe at such an early time? How do you form so many stars so quickly?' "
In the Washington Post article (which a paywall may prevent you from reading), we read this comment about observations of galaxies at very high redshifts, believed to be observations of galaxies appearing soon after the Big Bang:
"What has surprised astronomer Dan Coe of the Space Telescope Science Institute are the number of nicely shaped, disclike galaxies. 'We thought the early universe was this chaotic place where there's all these clumps of star formation, and things are all a jumble,' Coe said."
A galaxy as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope (credit:NASA)
You can find the latest papers on this topic by going to the Cornell physics paper server, and using a search phrase of "JWST+high-redshift" or "JWST+earliest galaxies" or "little red dots." Among the papers are these:
- The paper "A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: A Candidate z ~ 14 Galaxy in Early JWST CEERS Imaging" by dozens of different authors tells us this: "Should followup spectroscopy validate this redshift, our Universe was already aglow with fairly massive galaxies less than 300 Myr [million years] after the Big Bang." This contradicts what scientists have long told us, that such galaxies would take a billion years or longer to form.
- Another paper tells us, "Neither the high number of such objects found nor the high redshifts they reside at are expected from the previously favored predictions."
- Another paper reports the observation of "remarkably luminous" galaxies that already had a billion stars by the time the universe was only about 300 to 400 million years old.
- A paper is entitled "On the stunning abundance of super-early, massive galaxies revealed by JWST." We read of the detection of "of two very bright" galaxies at "super-early epochs," with masses of at least a billion solar masses. We are told "this detection poses a serious challenge to essentially all models," and that what is observed deviates by some ten times from what is predicted. The authors resort to a "conspiracy theory" to explain these findings, telling us, "The weak evolution from z = 7 to z ≈ 14 of the LF bright end arises from the conspiracy between a decreasing dust attenuation, making galaxies brighter, that almost exactly compensates for the increasing shortage of their host halos."
- A paper tells us, "The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has discovered a surprising abundance of bright galaxy candidates in the very early Universe (<500Myrs after the Big Bang), calling into question current galaxy formation models."
- Another paper is entitled "Schrodinger's Galaxy Candidate: Puzzlingly Luminous at z≈17, or Dusty/Quenched at z≈5?" The paper mentions a galaxy that seems to have about 5 billion stars, observed at a time when the universe was only about 200 million years old, noting that this "challenges virtually every early galaxy evolution model." The authors also resort to a "conspiracy theory" to try to explain this embarrassing finding, using the word "conspire" in their abstract.
- Another paper notes that "early observations with JWST have led to the discovery of an unexpected large density...of massive galaxies... at extremely high redshifts z ≈ 10, " and finds in its Section 7 that the most-popular model of cosmology (called lambda cold dark matter or LCDM) is "excluded" (in other words, ruled out) at a moderately strong two-sigma level by the latest observations.
- Another paper entitled "A very early onset of massive galaxy formation" refers to high redshift galaxies (believed to be the earliest galaxies formed), and notes that "the mass density in the most massive galaxies exceeds the total previously-estimated mass density... by a factor of ∼ 2 at z ∼ 8 and by two orders of magnitude at z ∼ 10." This being wrong by two orders of magnitude refers to predictions being wrong by a factor of about 100 times.
You can tell how inconsistent these observations are with predictions by going to a NASA page dated January 19, 2021. On that page a scientist says, "Galaxies, we think, begin building up in the first billion years after the big bang, and sort of reach adolescence at 1 to 2 billion years."
The term "little red dots" is now being used in the cosmology literature for these surprisingly large galaxies found very early in the history of the universe. The term refers to galaxies seen at the observation limits of the James Webb Space Telescope, which appear in photos as mere little red dots, despite their massive size. A search for the term "little red dots" on the Cornell physics paper server now gives 36 matches, such as the August 2024 paper "Sizes and Stellar Masses of the Little Red Dots Imply Immense Stellar Densities."
Gravity working to form galaxies would act very slowly. Galaxies seemed to have formed far more quickly after the Big Bang than scientists can account for, even when scientists are allowed to plug in to their scenarios some imaginary unproven things such as dark energy and dark matter. Sticking to known discovered particles, scientists cannot even explain how spiral galaxies retain their structure over many billions of years, despite galaxy rotations that should cause the spiral arms of galaxies to get broken up within a billion years. The problem becomes ten times worse when you consider "super spiral galaxies" much bigger than our galaxy.
But in late August 2024 we had an example of scientists doing what they so often do: engaging in desperate, far-fetched speculations to try to patch up some giant hole in their failing theories. What happened was that scientists made some weird, unverifiable speculation that mysterious black holes were causing the "little red dot" galaxies to look like they have much more stars than they do. Showing another of endless examples of its tendency to swallow "hook, line and sinker" the most far-fetched speculations, a bunch of science news sites reported this speculation as if it somehow managed to remove the explanatory problem caused by the "little red dot" galaxies.
An example of the bad coverage was this headline at www.space.com:
"Early galaxies weren't mystifyingly massive after all, James Webb Space Telescope finds
The bottom line is, there is no crisis in terms of the standard model of cosmology."
It wasn't the James Webb Space Telescope that found such a thing, but some speculating scientists trying to do do an analgesic analysis, one that would reduce the pain of cosmologists caused by how bad they are failing. The credulity of the writer of this article is striking. He writes "The scientists discovered that black holes made nine of these early galaxies appear much brighter — and thus bigger — than they really are" when he should be writing "scientists are now speculating that black holes made nine of these early galaxies appear much brighter — and thus bigger — than they really are." I guess he didn't read the part of the paper that states, "With only photometric colors available, it is extremely difficult to accurately determine the light contributed by the AGN component of these galaxies, making photometric stellar mass estimates for these sources extremely uncertain (Barro et al. 2024; Kocevski et al. 2023)." An examination of the paper shows that it is filled with all kinds of dubious arbitrary analysis.
A press release about the paper gives us more reasons for doubting the study. For one thing, we are told that the person in charge of the analysis was not a PhD scientist, but a mere graduate student. We are told that the study was "led by University of Texas at Austin graduate student Katherine Chworowsky." When it comes to the very hard job of properly analyzing the significance of "little red dots" at the faintest limits of telescopic observations, maybe 13 billion light-years away, would it not be better to have so very hard a task be led by someone who has a science PhD?
The press release tells how Chworowsky got her comforting "our theories still work" results: by speculation and throwing away the troubling observations. We read this (the italicized boldface part is pure speculation, and the underlined part refers to discarding important observations):
"According to this latest study, the galaxies that appeared overly massive likely host black holes rapidly consuming gas. Friction in the fast-moving gas emits heat and light, making these galaxies much brighter than they would be if that light emanated just from stars. This extra light can make it appear that the galaxies contain many more stars, and hence are more massive, than we would otherwise estimate. When scientists remove these galaxies, dubbed 'little red dots' (based on their red color and small size), from the analysis, the remaining early galaxies are not too massive to fit within predictions of the standard model."
Ah, we have yet another example of what scientists do so very often when observations defy their theories: they just throw away the offending observations, perhaps giving some little speculation to try to justify their discarding. So, for example, innumerable mentally normal witnesses have testified that they saw apparitions of the dead, as I am showing in my 60+ posts on this blog with a tag of "apparition." And the observational evidence for ESP and clairvoyance is overwhelming, consisting of 200 years of written evidence, much of it many times better than the evidence for many theories scientists cherish. But our mainstream scientists just throw away such observations that offend them, muttering the speculation of "hallucinations" or "coincidence" to try to justify their discarding of abundant important observations.
In such cases, it does not matter how thin or far-fetched the speculation is; it merely matters that it serves as an excuse (no matter how thin) for throwing away the data the scientist wishes to ignore. So in the study led by graduate student Chworowsky mentioned above, we have only a single sentence using the phrase ""black hole" or "black holes," the mere skimpy claim that " early JWST observations seem to indicate that accreting supermassive black holes are relatively common at z > 5." The press release quoted above has told us that "according to this latest study, the galaxies that appeared overly massive likely host black holes rapidly consuming gas." But that study had only a single sentence using the phrase "black hole " or "black holes."
This is typical. When scientists wish to throw away important observations that offend them and conflict with their cherished theories, they think all they need is the tiniest soundbite to justify their ignoring of important observations. To say that Chworowsky's paper has given us a half-baked speculation would seem to be too charitable. It might be better to say that she merely gave us the tiniest crumb to try to justify discarding the "tiny red dot" galaxy observations that so many cosmologists are worried about.
And so it is, again and again in the world of science: scientists throwing in their trash cans so many types of the most important observations, observations that offend them and conflict with their belief dogmas, while giving us only the tiniest crumb of a justification for such ignoring of important evidence.
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