Something weird near the beginning of time
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Standing by for terminal count. Two years ago, on Christmas, I was pretty pumped up. And not just because it was a day off work. Humans were launching this giant new gizmo into space.

This is the future. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. The James Webb Space Telescope, which is a mouthful, so sometimes it's just called JWST. This thing is the latest, greatest space telescope. Better in many ways than its predecessor, the Hubble. It can peer deeper into the cosmos than any previous orbiting observatory. It could just do so much stuff.

like investigate planets orbiting other suns. Take a look at this, a giant red planet outside of our solar system. It could observe the birth and demise of stars. What we're seeing here is essentially a stellar nursery. But the thing that I think is coolest about it is that we're going right up to the edge of the observable universe.

That's astronomer Caitlin Casey. She actually gets to use the Webb Telescope. And I talked to her before it launched. We chatted about how things very far away in space, in a telescope, are actually also very old because the light has taken a long time to reach us. And with the James Webb Space Telescope, some of that light is almost as old as the universe itself. We're trying to see...

which galaxies turned on first? This was a couple of years ago, and I just wanted to get an update from Caitlin. Has JWST, has it lived up to the hype? And to put it simply, Caitlin and her colleagues, they're just starstruck.

I use every second that I can squirrel away from my family, from teaching my classes at the university. I use every second of every day to just look at these images and dig deeper.

Is JWSD getting in the way of relationships, family, destroying lives? Yeah, well, it's funny. I have three kids under three, so my life is mandatory. I have a lot of balance of personal life. But yeah, after the kids go to bed, that's when the data pops up. We're working again because it's just so fascinating. ♪

I really wanted to know, what is she looking at on her laptop that's keeping her up at night? Wild things in the early universe. At the earliest times, the universe was having a party and we had no idea it was happening.

Caitlin says that before the web, she thought there just wouldn't be a ton to see so far back in time. We thought we would maybe see a couple of more distant galaxies, but they would be very, very rare. Instead, they're seeing something unexpected. And this is what's just amazing to me. This telescope turned on and now we have one of the new biggest questions in science.

It's sending researchers into a frenzy to try to explain what the hell is going on. The party that is happening in the early universe is really shocking to astronomers. So that is today's show. What has the James Webb Space Telescope discovered that is so shocking? How far will you come? And still have to go. How far will you come?

Each one tells us how far we have come.

What is the party? What is the most surprising thing that Webb has shown us? Yeah, so JWST has been mind-boggling because we have found really mature, large, bright galaxies back even further than we expected. There are extraordinarily massive, mature galaxies

at this time that we just, we had no clue. It's really baffling. And it's looking at a time in the universe's history where we're really starting to butt up against the age of the universe itself. It's, you know, how do you form Rome in a day? Like, you can't form Rome in a day, right? Because it's just, there's too much to do. And...

These galaxies are Rome, and they have formed in a day. You know, they are unusual in almost every way, and they've had very, very little time to assemble. Wow. You know, another helpful analogy that I really like

If you think about generations of people and their families and how that progresses, it's as if your grandparents were only like four to five years older than you and your parents are only a year or two older than you.

So this is as weird as learning your grandfather grew to be an adult in four days and then started his own family or four years or whatever. Yeah, that makes no sense, right? So that's what's happening to stars in these distant galaxies. What do they look like in the images you see? They look like faint smudges. They are just...

unassuming dots of light that looked like almost every other unassuming, you know, dot of light. You can infer from these smudgy little blips of light that they are actually huge and mature and very bright and bigger than you'd expect for the time period. Yeah. So instead of just taking a single picture of a galaxy, we're able to understand how much energy comes out

in all sorts of different types of light. We say a picture is worth a thousand words. That's absolutely true. But, you know, a spectrum is worth a thousand pictures. So it's just so much information and

It's like a fingerprint for all of these different galaxies. And these dots are little smudges on the sky, barely visible. And, you know, if you just have that image, you can guess that it's a distant galaxy, but you don't know much about it. You don't know how massive it is. You don't know what it's made out of. But these are things that...

we can tell by reading the fingerprint, the chemical signature of these galaxies from their spectra. And so that's been astounding. Okay, so there are early big galaxies in the universe.

So, so what? Yeah, so what is right? I mean, it's a good question. And it turns out that if you really dig into the details of that question, it's a challenge for not just astronomers, but physicists to come up with a way where you can form something so big so quickly in the short period of time after the Big Bang.

So are you basically telling me these early galaxies, we have no idea how they formed? Well, I think we have an idea of how most galaxies form.

Later on in the universe's history, they build stars from gas, like hydrogen gas that's in space, right? And over time, they're building more and more stars and those build up. But when you push it to the limit and find...

a lot of stars very early on in the universe's history, then you have to come up with some other explanation. And some folks want to throw out our cosmological model completely. And that is, you know, that would change everything we think we understand about the universe. But, you know, not everyone is digging that. Yeah, wow.

I do want to get to what are the possibilities here, but before, I feel like it's good to ask. Are we really confident that these galaxies are as old and as bright and as weird as you're saying? Another great question. And boy, have there been debates about that at conferences. Tomatoes have been thrown, let me tell you that.

Literal tomatoes or metaphoric ones? Metaphorical, of course. We're quite civilized. If what the Webb telescope has discovered aren't big, bright galaxies, what are they? That's after the break.

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So I've been talking to astronomer Caitlin Casey about whether these weirdly large, mature galaxies spotted by the Webb telescope are really what we think they are.

Yeah, it's a huge point of debate whether or not these are actually as massive as we think. But the alternate explanation, get this, is also really confusing. If they aren't as massive and bright and big as we think, then maybe we're looking at some of the most massive, supermassive black holes. What?

The reason that is disturbing is because just like we don't know how to form stars really quickly, we have really no clue how to form black holes that are so massive. So, you know, you're saying that the telescope has picked up that these are really bright, they're really big, right?

We're assuming they're galaxies, but also a black hole could be bright and big? Yeah, so they are galaxies for sure. But there is a situation where the light might not be coming from stars. And the alternate option is that light is coming from a very, very hot disk of material that is being sucked into a giant black hole.

And that disk of material is so hot that it shines really brightly. It can even, in some situations, outshine the galaxy in which it lives. Wow.

Before you said that, like, some people are saying, you know, maybe we need to throw out our cosmological models. And I was curious what, like, one, what is the cosmological model? And two, like, why does this even implicate something that sounds so big like that? Yeah, it actually means the theory of everything. It tells us

the physics of the entire universe. It is the scaffolding on which we build our understanding, you know? And if we have to take that scaffolding down and rebuild it, then we really have no clue where

You know, what reality is. So when you say like some people are even thinking about rewriting the cosmological model, what's like a small piece of that, like rethinking of like how gravity works or rethinking how, you know, somebody like something like that?

We're not necessarily... I think, you know, most astronomers are pretty cool with gravity. We're not going to throw gravity out any time soon. But, for example, something we don't understand, dark energy, maybe we...

don't understand it at another level, and it could have been doing something different than what we think at really early times. So, for example, if you inject a little more energy into dark energy in the short period of time after the Big Bang, then you could maybe get out what we're seeing with JWST.

Have you heard any compelling stories of how these stars form so quickly? How these, you know, like, what are some good guesses here? One explanation, which is kind of cool, is if you think about the early universe, it's a really dark place compared to where, you know, where we live now. There are all sorts of galaxies with lots of starlight flooding outwards.

out into space and filling the cosmos. And that light actually impacts how stars form out of new gas clouds. It makes it harder sometimes to form stars. And so in the early universe, those floodlights are not on.

And so you could form stars really, really quickly in a way that can't happen today because right now the floodlights are on. That's interesting. The idea is that starlight itself impedes the development of other stars. Yeah, yeah. It sounds like these explanations you're just telling me maybe fit within our cosmological model and just, you know, without throwing it out.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, you know, as scientists, that's what we aim to do first because, you know, our cosmological model does a pretty good job. It explains a lot about the universe. And anytime you change it,

Everything is affected. And so you kind of don't want to throw out the prevailing theory until you absolutely know that it's wrong. And so, yeah, we try to come up with explanations within that scaffolding. What's next? How do we figure out this mystery? What happens next?

We are digging deep into these data. I mean, I can tell you again, like we have just scratched the surface. There is so much more to learn. We're still digging through data

these remarkably large, deep-field images that we have. We want to take spectra, again, to get the chemical signatures of these galaxies. Those spectra also tell us that there are supermassive black holes in these galaxies. We want to precisely measure how common they are at different times after the Big Bang. And

In the assembly of all of this research, I think we'll start to emerge with a new picture of the infant universe this first couple hundred million years in hopefully, you know, the next year or two. I'm not going to... Don't quote me on that. Do you ever wonder... I feel, like, embarrassed asking this question almost. I don't know. Do you ever wonder if the universe is just here to mess with us? Like...

I do. I do. I mean, you know, you look back on history and like, man, some very, very smart people have been totally like flabbergasted at what the universe has revealed. Like, you know, did Einstein like the expanding universe? No way. He was not a fan. Like, that makes no sense. Does the acceleration of the universe make sense? No. Yeah.

So totally, in some ways, I'm just like, man, how cool that the story of everything is just so profoundly different than what we would expect. Overall, just why is it important to understand this early universe and this hiccup in our understanding? I will always go back to the explanation that, you know,

When we look out on the cosmos, it is us looking out on what we are. I mean, this is the ultimate origin story is where we came from. And if we can get a better understanding of that, then I think it's really beautiful. The crazy wild universe that we live in, that we can come to understand it from within is a pretty profound thing to me.

Is it kind of like us humans have been kind of put inside this puzzle box? And even if there's no prize in solving the puzzle box, who knows what the prize is for solving the puzzle box? But it's just like... I mean, I think that's the ultimate prize, isn't it? It's like if you solve the puzzle box that you live in, you've solved it. You've figured it out. I mean, there could be no better accomplishment. And it's just a real privilege that...

astronomers get to do this for a living, right? That we get to try to solve the biggest puzzle there is. And I just love it. And the puzzle is? The puzzle is what is this universe and why is it so bonkers? This episode was produced by me, Brian Resnick, with help from Noam Hassenfeld and Meredith Hadenot, who also manages our team.

Editing from Jorge Just, music from Noam, and mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala. Fact-checking from Kelsey Lannan. Mandy Nguyen is searching for new forms of life. And even though Bird Pinkerton had listened to the octopus explain how she was the Chosen One, she didn't know what to do. So the octopus leaned over and said, You must go to your people. You must talk to the birds.

If you want a transcript for this episode, we've got a link in the show notes. And if you have thoughts about this episode or ideas for the show, please email us. We're at unexplainable at vox.com. We'd also love it if you left us a review or rating. This podcast and all of Vox is free, in part because of gifts from our readers and listeners. You can go to vox.com slash give to give today. And if you do give, and if you're giving because of our show, maybe let Vox know that you enjoy Unexplainable.

Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We're off next week for the holidays, but we'll be back in your feed on the first Wednesday morning of 2024.

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