As soon as James Webb began his career, he seemed to have “broken” cosmological models. We have another explanation.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is an amazing instrument: it allows us to see not only far away, but also far in time. The observatory is able to look close to the edges of the observable universe, which means it can also “see” the universe in its early stages.

The problem arose when analysis of the telescope’s images showed us galaxies that were too bright and massive to be in the early Universe.

New explanation of the mystery. Now a new study offers a new explanation for one of the mysteries that emerged from James Webb’s early years. The answer may lie in black holes and how they accelerate matter orbiting them in accretion disks to incandescence.

So old, so bright. The mystery in question arose after the release of the first image taken by JWST, which contained the most distant galaxies ever captured.

As some teams studied this image and the data associated with it, they realized that something didn’t add up: Some of the galaxies were too bright. Such high luminosity would in principle imply that these were very massive galaxies, too massive to have formed in the early stages of the universe, a few hundred million years after big bang.

Don’t throw away the model. These observations are being verified(a priori) the “standard model” of cosmology traditionally used by the scientific community: something didn’t add up. This is often bittersweet news, since it is often through the cracks in the model that one can break through to a better model.

Only this may not be so.

Black holes. The new explanation for this brightness is not related to the mass of the galaxy, but to the densest objects imaginable: black holes. According to this new hypothesis, these bright galaxies will contain black holes inside them, which in turn will consume huge amounts of gas.

The enormous acceleration these particles will undergo will cause them to emit light and heat, light that will be responsible for “illuminating” these galaxies. Light that, combined with the light emitted by the stars of the galaxy itself, will produce these super-luminous dots.

Small red dots. That’s why these galaxies have been nicknamed “little red dots” in observations. In their study, the team conducted an analysis of early galaxies that excluded these “anomalous” observations, which are thought to be caused by black holes.

With those “little red dots” stripped away, the sample began to resemble what we expect from this early universe. Details of the study were published this week in a journal article. Astronomical Journal.

There is no crisis, but mysteries remain. There is still a major mystery to solve, which is not so much about the size of the primordial galaxies, but about their number: there are too many of them. We have found more than twice as many galaxies of this type as would be expected in the young Universe.

“We still see more galaxies than expected, although none of them are massive enough to ‘destroy’ the universe,” Katherine Hworowski, who led the team responsible for the new work, said in a press release.

There is no answer to this question yet. “Perhaps in the early Universe, galaxies were better at turning gas into stars,” Khvorovsky suggests.

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Image | NASA, ESA, CSA