SC Connecticut News

An international team of astronomers has identified three supermassive galaxies, referred to as "Red Monsters," that were fully formed within the first billion years after the Big Bang. This discovery was made possible through data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), challenging previous beliefs about the timeline of galaxy formation.

Pieter van Dokkum, a professor at Yale University and co-author of the study published in Nature, compared the discovery to finding fossils of fully formed animals in Earth's earliest rocks. The research team, led by scientists from the University of Geneva, utilized data from JWST's FRESCO Survey to identify these early galaxies and measure their distances and masses accurately.

The capabilities of JWST have enabled astronomers to explore galaxies in the distant and early universe systematically. While most galaxies observed fit existing models, three unexpectedly massive ones were found with star counts similar to today's Milky Way. These galaxies are forming stars at nearly twice the rate of less massive counterparts formed later, earning them their "Red Monsters" moniker due to their dust-induced red appearance in images.

Mengyuan Xiao, lead author and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Geneva, stated that these findings are reshaping our understanding of early galaxy formation. Traditionally, it was believed that only about 20% of a galaxy's gas turns into stars over time. However, van Dokkum and his colleagues suggest that these early supermassive galaxies might have been much more efficient in this process.

Van Dokkum noted that these galaxies converted nearly all their gas into stars within a few hundred million years—a brief period cosmologically speaking. Despite this revelation, researchers emphasized that their findings do not contradict standard cosmological models but introduce new possibilities for rapid growth under certain conditions.

Future observations with JWST and ALMA in Chile aim to provide further insights into these "Red Monsters" and potentially uncover more such galaxies. The research involved over three dozen astronomers from institutions across various countries including the United States, Switzerland, Denmark, and others.