It has more stars than such a young galaxy should be able to grow
BULLETIN
A galaxy that shouldn’t exist is challenging astronomers’ understanding of how these enormous stellar structures grow in the early Universe.
Despite its relative youth, recent observations of galaxy JWST 7329 have shown it has far more stars than it should have had time to grow. It was first spotted in 2010 in an infrared sky survey and immediately struck astronomers as being something special. Ground-based follow-up observations proved inadequate, however, and astronomers had to wait until the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) came online to take a spectrum of it.
The galaxy is so far away that we are seeing it as it was 11.5 billion years ago, just two billion years after the Big Bang. Even at this tender age, the galaxy already has a stellar population that’s around 1.5 billion years old and has four times as many stars by mass as the Milky Way does today. On top of this, the galaxy appears to have been quenched – meaning it has lost its cold gas, supressing star formation – for at least a billion years.
Several similar star-filled youngsters have been discovered in recent years, though JWST 7329 is the most extreme example uncovered so far. Their existence is causing
