Three “red monsters” are causing trouble at the ends of the Universe –

Three “red monsters” are causing trouble at the ends of the Universe

The discovery in the very distant (and therefore very young) Universe of three ultra-massive galaxies, which give birth to stars at unexpected speeds, calls into question the current models of formation of these structures composed in particular of stars and gas.

The three red monsters are extremely massive and dusty galaxies in the first billion years after the Big Bang. © NASA/CSA/ESA/UNIGE/Niels Bohr Institute/Dawn JWST Archive

An international team led by Pascal Oesch, associate professor at the Department of Astronomy (Faculty of Sciences), has identified three ultra-massive galaxies at very great distances, and therefore in the very distant past, corresponding to an era when the Universe n It was still only in its first billion years after the Big Bang (it is 13.8 years old today, give or take a few tens of millions of years). Hooked by the instruments of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) as part of the Fresco program, these three “red monsters”, as astronomers have called them, are almost as massive as today’s Milky Way, which hosts the Solar System. These results, published on November 13 in the journal Natureindicate that star formation in the early Universe was much more efficient than previously thought and call into question models of galaxy formation.