“The first-ever results from the James Webb Space Telescope seem to indicate that massive, luminous galaxies had already formed in the first 250 million years after the Big Bang,” it said. Sky and telescope.
“If confirmed, it would seriously challenge current cosmological thinking.”
Shortly after NASA published Webb’s first batch of science data, the arXiv astronomical preprint server was inundated with papers claiming to have the detection of galaxies so remote that their light took about 13.5 billion years to reach us. Many of these appear to be more massive than the standard cosmological model describing the composition and evolution of the universe. “I’m a little concerned that we’re finding these monsters in the first few images,” said cosmologist Richard Ellis (University College London).
Before the community accepts these claims, the reported redshifts must be confirmed spectroscopically. Mark McCaughrean, the senior science adviser to the European Space Agency (a key partner at Webb) responded on Twitter: “I’m sure some of them [confirmed]but I’m equally sure they won’t all be. […] It all feels a bit like a sugar rush right now.”
Ellis agrees, “It’s one thing to write an article about arXiv,” he says, “but it’s quite another to make it a lasting article in a peer-reviewed journal.”
Science writer Eric Lerner has argued since 1991 that the Big Bang never happened. Now 75 years old, he writes:
In the deluge of technical astronomical papers published online since July 12, the authors report time and again that the images show a surprising number of galaxies, galaxies that are surprisingly smooth, surprisingly small and surprisingly old. Lots of surprises, and not necessarily pleasant ones. The title of a paper begins with the candid exclamation, “Panic!”
Why are the images of the JWST causing panic among cosmologists? And which predictions of the theory contradict? The papers don’t actually say it. The truth that these papers fail to report is that the hypothesis that the JWST’s depictions are blatantly and repeatedly contradictory is the big bang hypothesis that the universe began in an incredibly hot, dense state 14 billion years ago and has been expanding ever since. Since that hypothesis has been defended as unquestionable truth by the vast majority of cosmological theorists for decades, the new data is causing these theorists to panic. “Right now, I’m up at three in the morning,” said Alison Kirkpatrick, an astronomer at the University of Kansas at Lawrence, “and wonder if everything I’ve done is wrong….”
Even galaxies with greater brightness and mass than our own Milky Way galaxy appear in these images to be two to three times smaller than in comparable images observed with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and the new galaxies have redshifts that are also two to three times smaller. This is not at all what you would expect from an expanding universe, but it is exactly what me and my colleague Riccardo Scarpa predicted based on a non-expanding universe, with redshift proportional to distance…. [T]the galaxies that the JWST shows are as big as the galaxies close to us, if it is believed that the universe is not expanding and that the redshift is proportional to the distance…..
Big Bang theorists expected that badly disfigured galaxies would be distorted by many collisions or mergers. What the JWST actually showed were overwhelmingly smooth disks and neat spiral shapes, just like we see in today’s galaxies. The data in the “Panic!” paper showed that smooth spiral galaxies were about “10 times” as numerous as what the theory had predicted and that this would “challenge our ideas about mergers as a common process”. In plain language, this data completely destroys the fusion theory….
According to the big bang theory, the most distant galaxies in the JWST images are seen as if they were only 400-500 million years after the creation of the universe. Yet some galaxies have already shown stellar populations that are more than a billion years old. Since nothing could have formed before the Big Bang, the existence of these galaxies shows that the Big Bang did not happen….
While Big Bang theorists were shocked and panicked by these new results, Riccardo and I (and a few others) were not. A week before the JWST images were released, we published a paper online detailing what the images would show. We could do this with confidence because more and more data of all kinds have been contradicting the big bang hypothesis for years….
Based on the published literature, the Big Bang currently makes 16 wrong predictions and only one correct one: the abundance of deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen.
Thanks to Slashdot reader magzteel for sharing the article.
