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‘We haven’t seen objects like this before.’ A CU scientist says a recent discovery could unlock big new questions about the universe

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11min 45sec
Space Telescope-Galaxies
AP
This image provided by NASA and the European Space Agency shows images of six candidate massive galaxies, seen 500-800 million years after the Big Bang. One of the sources (bottom left) could contain as many stars as our present-day Milky Way, but is 30 times more compact (NASA via AP)

An article out today in the journal Nature analyzes an early image from the James Webb Space Telescope to identify what may be six giant galaxies that formed in the early days of the universe. CU astrophysicist Erica Nelson is a co-author of the report. She says the galaxies formed about 500 million years after the Big Bang, much earlier than scientists believed was possible. “It just completely upends our understanding of how objects formed in the universe. It upends our models of cosmology.”