JWST finds a half dozen giant galaxies older than the “Big Bang”. The Universe is fine, the Big Bang theory is dead.
Once again, images from the James Webb Space Telescope(JWST) have caused alarm and consternation among cosmologists. “We found something so unexpected it actually creates problems for science”, exclaimed Dr. Joel Leja, assistant professor of astrophysics at Penn State, one of the authors of the new paper in Nature causing the latest cosmic kerfuffle. “We’ve been informally calling these objects universe breakers”, he continued in a statement released Feb. 22 by the Penn State university.
LPPFusion’s Chief Scientist Eric J. Lerner, who, with colleagues, has been putting forward a different take on JWST’s results, commented in a statement, ”Actually, these new results are just fine for science and the universe won’t be hurt by a few new images. Not to worry! What these objects can rightly be called is “theory-breakers” because they deliver more big blows in breaking up the theory of the Big Bang, and the idea of an expanding universe. I congratulate Dr. Leja, Dr. Ivo Labbe, first author of the paper, (Swinburne University of Technology) and their co-authors on their discoveries, but they were to be expected and in fact we predicted them — on the basis of rejecting the Big Bang hypothesis.”
Dr. Leja and colleagues, and many other cosmologists around the world were shocked because the properties of these remote galaxies are similar to the ones of the Milky Way and other big nearby galaxies. According to the Big Bang hypothesis, no such galaxies should exist at such an early epoch, only hundreds of millions of years after the supposed birth of the universe. Only extremely young tiny proto-galaxies should exist, according to that theory. But the new JWST images show “mature” galaxies, made of billions of stars similar to the one observed in our own galaxy, including lots of yellow and reddish stars which had been shining for billions of years. (See Figure 1 for how the images indicate how old the stellar populations of the galaxies are.)
But Lerner and colleagues, basing their published predictions on the hypothesis of a non-expanding universe, with no Big Bang, were not surprised at all. In fact, in a paper published online in June, 2022 before the release of any of JWTS’s images, Dr. Riccardo Scarpa of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias and Lerner correctly predicted that with JWST as with its predecessor the Hubble Space Telescope, images would show that “distant galaxies are found to be similar to local galaxies”.
Fig. 1 The spectrum of massive galaxy JWST 38094 (black points) does not at all look like that of a 400 million year-old galaxy (blue line, top graph), blazing with ultraviolet stars. (UV is to the left, green to the right in these spectra). But it does look a lot like a 2 billion-year old galaxy (green line, bottom graph) glowing with yellow stars. For comparison, the sun’s spectrum is brightest at 500 nm, almost the same green wavelength as the JWST 38094 peak. Light at 450 nm looks blue to our eyes, 400 nm violet and shorter wavelengths are ultraviolet. JWST data from new Nature paper, 400 million year model from Bruzal and Charlot and 2 billion-year model from Vazdekis .
Why then did these perfectly ordinary, but very distant, galaxies generate such surprise and consternation among most cosmologists? Exclusively because, once again, they contradicted the clear, repeated, published predictions of the Big Bang hypothesis. According to that hypothesis, the entire universe sprung into being in an extreme dense hot state 13.7 billion years ago and remained for 400 million years too hot and chaotic to form even stars, let alone large galaxies. Thus, according to Big Bang formulae, the galaxies in the new JWST images should not exist at all. Large mature galaxies at these distances would imply the existence of objects older than the Universe itself and therefore are “impossible galaxies”. But the new observation showed that not only did these “impossible galaxies” exist, they are common at these great distances. Hence the great surprise at…. the wrong predictions of the Big Bang hypothesis.
A Second “Impossibility”
The new set of galaxies are not just impossibly old for the Big Bang hypothesis, they also appear to be too small and too dense. Researchers have mentioned the density problem but have not detailed it publicly so far. Lerner explains what the second contradiction is.
“If you hypothesize the universe is not expanding, as Riccardo and I did, then of course objects at high distance look smaller on the sky. Knowing that redshift is proportional to distance, you can get the distance to these big galaxies from the redshift. Then, by just arithmetic, you can calculate how big they are. The biggest one turns out to be about 15 kpc in radius, just the size of our Milky Way. Again, not surprising. “
However, Lerner points out, if one hypothesizes that the universe is expanding, a strange, but very well-known optical illusion should make objects appear larger on the sky at huge distances, not smaller. Using Big Bang calculations, then, the tiny angular size of the largest of these galaxies (and of many other discovered by JWST) implies a ridiculously small linear radius for galaxies, about 30 times smaller than the Milky Way, and matter densities 30 thousand times higher than that of our own galaxy. This is much too dense to be real, for at least two reasons:
- First, the hydrogen gas in such an ultra-dense galaxy would absorb far too much ultraviolet light, contradicting the observations of the JWST images.
- Second, they would have far more intense gravitational fields than observed. The strong field would cause stars in the galaxies to whip around their orbits at around 750 km/sec, triple the speed of our sun and other stars in the Milky Way.
While the orbital speed measurement required high-resolution spectra that have not yet been obtained for these particular galaxies, other newly-released spectra for similar galaxies in the JWST fields show, again, orbital speeds just the same as in the Milky Way. This would lead to the calculation of total mass in the galaxies being over TEN TIMES smaller than the mass of stars – an obvious impossibility.
“As soon as better JWST data becomes available, in particular spectroscopic data, everything will be clear and the Big Bang hypothesis, and in particular the concept of space expansion, will have to be abandoned”, added Dr. Scarpa. “Thus modern astrophysics will be back on the right track, leaving behind both dark matter and dark energy, two major aberrations produced by the stubborn and blind insistence on the Big Bang hypothesis.”
Lerner and Scarpa are not the only ones pointing out the massive contradiction between the JWST images sizes and the expansion/Big Bag hypothesis. In a paper published December 1st in the peer-reviewed journal Galaxies, Nikita Lovyagin of St. Petersburg State University and his colleagues came to the same conclusion that, “the first JWST observations of high-redshift objects cannot be explained by the expanding-Universe model”.
In Lerner’s view what is truly surprising is that cosmologists are still clinging to this theory after its predictions have been contradicted by over a dozen major data sets, including earlier JWST images. They have been confirmed only by one: the abundance of deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen). “A theory that makes predictions that are over 90% wrong is like an airline that crashes 90% of the time,” says Lerner. “Our cosmologist colleagues need to stop being surprised and get off this doomed airline. The Big Bang hypothesis is dead. ”