00:00The James Webb Space Telescope has found galaxies that should not exist.
00:04Fully formed, massive galaxies, appearing just 300 million years after the Big Bang,
00:10when our models say there was not nearly enough time for them to form.
00:15Cosmologists are not just surprised.
00:18Some are saying our entire model of the early universe may need to be rewritten.
00:23The James Webb Space Telescope launched on Christmas Day 2021
00:27and began science operations in 2022.
00:31It is the most powerful telescope ever built,
00:34capable of seeing light from the earliest epochs of the universe,
00:38detecting infrared signals so faint they have been traveling for over 13 billion years.
00:45Within its first year of operation,
00:47Webb found something that stopped the scientific community cold.
00:51It detected galaxies in the very early universe,
00:54some existing just 300 to 500 million years after the Big Bang,
00:59that were already massive,
01:01already structured,
01:03already containing hundreds of billions of stars.
01:06According to our standard model of cosmology,
01:09the Lambda-CDM model,
01:11galaxies form gradually.
01:13The Delta —
01:14The Delta
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