Distant galaxies seem to be far more massive than expected by today’s Bigbangers (sneakily pejorative neologism!). To the point of impossibility! The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) spotted galaxies with masses up to 100 billion times that of the sun that must have formed faster than current models can explain (by comparison our giant Milky Way is 15 times more massive, 1.5 trillion solar masses).
By studying a small patch of sky, with the JWST, Swede physicist Ivo Labbé at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia and colleagues measured the distances to six massive galaxies using their cosmic redshift. Ivo Labbé’s galaxies are (now) all around 30 billion light years away. According to the Lambda Cold Dark Matter Big Bang model, those galaxies formed within 700 million years of the big bang, so 13 billion years ago.
Objects further from our Milky Way galaxy group move away from us ever more quickly, the further they are from the expansion of the universe. Said expansion was discovered by a number of astronomers more than a century ago, including the famous Edwin Hubble, a greedy lawyer turned astronomer and according to some, an expert plagiarist, who used the world’s most powerful telescope (at the time)… besides earlier discoveries from several European astronomers (Reynolds, Lemaitre, etc.)
Distant galaxies appear redder than nearby galactic clusters because the light waves coming from them are literally stretched by cosmic expansion [1]… (This cosmic shift shows that each photon of light is nonlocal, by the way. If, as Einstein suggested in 1905 a photon was just a point, it would not stretch, hey.)
“I would have guessed that galaxies like this would not exist this early in the universe,” says Pieter van Dokkum at Yale University (Connecticut), part of the research team. That is because the galaxies all had masses at least 10 billion times the mass of the sun, with one weighing in at 100 billion solar masses. From LCDM models of galactic evolution, we would expect galaxies as young as these to be relatively low-mass, without many stars at all, and then they would grow over time until they became more like our own Milky Way galaxy, which a mass of about a trillion solar masses.
Indeed in the Big Bang LCDM model, galaxies grow around cores of Dark Matter, present from the start. In LCDM massive elliptical galaxies take much time to grow to their mass through fusion of smaller galaxies. Low-mass galaxies form first, and then the star-forming galaxies merge as they crash into each other. A contemporary elliptical must contain stars that formed over many billion years ago in the merger precursors. But observed, real elliptical galaxies formed very fast, and very early. They appear to have been the first galaxies to have emerged after the Big Bang, forming from the single collapse of a giant post-Big-Bang gas cloud.
These young galaxies observed by the JWST in 2022 are more massive and more compact than expected than the LCDM Big Bang. “What could be going on is that the centers of galaxies form very early, earlier than we thought, then the rest of the galaxy builds up around them,” says van Dokkum (this is exactly what SQPR predicts). “I suspect that we’re looking at not finished products, but beginnings that happened very quickly.”
“If all of this holds up with further investigation, then we are looking at having to rethink some of the early history of galaxy formation,” says Andrew Pontzen at University College London.
Further investigation is crucial. That follow-up will consist of detailed observations and analysis of the galaxies’ light spectra with JWST, which van Dokkum says could take about a year. Stealthily the mood is propagating that if these findings do hold up, it may be a problem for our understanding of the universe more generally, not just galaxy formation. “It was pointed out to us after we submitted the paper that there wasn’t actually enough gas in the universe at that point to form [as many massive galaxies as this study suggests] – and that was a bit of a shocker,” says Labbé. “If you form these monsters, and they contain more stars than the available gas in the universe, that’s a bit of a problem.” Indeed, one may say so. LCDM is vulnerable, because it’s a very steep pyramid of hypotheses. Remove one, and the whole thing collapses.
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In the 1930s Swiss Caltech astronomer genius Fritz Zwicky discovered that the outer stars of galaxies were rotating at the same speed as the inner ones. Assuming that mot of the mass was in their stars, galaxies violated the fundamental Third Law (1618) of Johann Kepler, which states that in a rotational system held together by gravitational attraction, the objects furthest from the center revolve more slowly than those closer in (the square of the period is proportional to the cube of the radius). For example, Mercury revolves around the Sun in 88 days, the Earth in 365, Jupiter in seven years, and Pluto in 90,520 days!
To have the outer stars of galaxies rotate as fast as the inner ones is as outrageous as if Pluto revolved around the Sun in 88 days, over a thousand times faster than it actually does. Galaxies rotate like solid plates! The matter is beautifully exhibited by galaxies with a bar in the middle: the bar moves as a solid straight mass! Then it was found galaxies in clusters moved as fast as they should if the mass of the clusters were ten times greater than it actually seem to be (to evaluate .
The solution to this is the Dark Matter Hypothesis (DMH); a mysterious still-unknown gravitational mass holding all the stars in its grip. One thing that DMH, by itself, does not explain is why the Dark Matter is where it is, in particular places and often segregated from normal matter. For example why is Dark Matter in the suburbs of giant spiral galaxies rather than in the center? That, once installed somewhere, Dark Matter wouls stay there (say in orbit around the center of a galaxy at a particular distance) is not surprising, because Dark Matter doesn’t interact much, except gravitationally (otherwise we would see it!)
So it’s not just Dark Matter that is needed, but also explaining why Dark Matter is positioned where it is (a conventional explanation with ions held in particular places by electromagnetic fields is imaginable; that’s what some Italians proposed; we will see what specialists say,
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TIME FOR SUB QUANTUM REALITY?
Sub Quantum Physical Reality (SQPR) assumes that the Quantum Waves used to compute in Quantum Physics are “real”: “real” means that the Quantum Waves are not just knowledge waves, they carry an energy-momentum of their own which can be torn to shred when they collapse to form “particles” when the waves are spread over too great a distance. The leftover, non-”particle” debris is Dark Matter.
SQPR weakens field carrier bosons over cosmic distances, while creating a hidden thermodynamics which pushes space away, causing the appearance of Dark Energy, inflating the universe.
Bohr, when presented to alternatives of Quantum Mechanics, simply said: “the difficulty is that they are not crazy enough”. SQPR should be crazy enough: instead of holding the universe together only with Henri Poincaré’s constancy of the velocity of light, it gets subtle about it, and the true architecture of the cosmos is from the superluminal entanglements of the Quantum Interaction.
Having already one reason for cosmic expansion, SQPR does away with standard Big Bang cosmic inflation, while keeping Dark Energy (DE is observed; Cosmic Inflation during the big Bang is just a hypothesis to make the Big Bang work) … And thus the universe is much older than it looks. So giant elliptical galaxies had plenty of time to appear, from giant gas clouds collapsing. The geometry of a giant elliptical galaxy is not favorable to the apparition of Dark Matter, because the mean free path of a particle is below the exponential radius of the Quantum Interaction.
The apparition of spiral galaxies comes from a combination of gravitation and conservation of angular momentum. According to SQPR, the spiral geometry is favorable to the apparition of Dark Matter. Hence the accelerating expansion of the universe as spirals appeared.
SQPR goes far, explains a lot, by supposing little, and what’s supposed is very natural. LCDM may well prove to have been a collective hallucination (those who may feel I am too confrontational are invited to look at cosmic inflation, a completely ad hoc hypothesis… needed for the basic Big Bang theory, so even more basic than LCDM).
In the great scientific revolutions, the preceding paradigm is found barking at the wrong tree, and it was not even a bush…
Patrice Ayme
How compact galaxies grow in the SQPR model: Dark Matter tends to appear where the collapse free entanglement radius is greater than the SQPR exponential function (technical differential geometry allusion)… in other words, on the outskirts of the compact galaxy, which then tends to expand in that Dark Matter belt, both from the inside, out, and from the outside, in:
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 