How chaotic were the universe's 1st galaxies? Find out here
Turns out, the universe's first galaxies were pretty wild.
Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scientists found that galaxies formed 800 million to 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang were chaotic and fast-growing—not neat and orderly like our Milky Way.
This discovery, published October 21, shakes up what we thought we knew about how galaxies evolve.
Research team plans to study composition of early galaxies next
Lola Danhaive and her team at the University of Cambridge's Kavli Institute for Cosmology checked out over 250 early galaxies with JWST's infrared tech.
They spotted "messy kinematics"—basically, these galaxies didn't spin smoothly but were full of gas and forming stars at a crazy pace.
Over time, these unstable starburst systems settled into more organized shapes.
Next up: researchers plan to dig into what these early galaxies were made of to figure out why some changed faster than others.