Populated too early
The theory of the Big Bang and the development of the early universe is becoming more and more shaky. The latest problem: Just two billion years after the beginning of all beginnings, there were more than twice as many galaxies as astronomers expected.
Knowledge is power, says an old adage. But sometimes knowledge is also a source of trouble, cosmologists may think in the face of all the new observation data. Everything used to seem so wonderfully clear and coherent: around 13.7 billion years ago, out of nothing and never, an infinitely dense point of energy tunneled into existence, found that it was completely empty all around, yes, that actually no " All Around" existed, and as the Big Bang, space, time, and matter/energy (two forms of the same thing) exploded into the not-yet-existent world. As a result, radiation became particles, particles became accumulations with an effective gravitational force, and accumulations became stars and galaxies. The universe as we know it was complete.
A nice theory that has long raised many questions about "Where from?" answered and continues to answer. If it weren't for the constant curiosity of the scientists, who probe, investigate and ponder over and over again with better and better instruments. The questions "What can I see with this?" and "How does that fit into the theory?" have already caused many a construct of thought to shake or even collapse. Ultimately, this process is an indispensable guarantee for the progress of knowledge, as one is told on every media corner in Einstein Year.
Now for a number of years it has looked as if the Big Bang theory has had to prove itself in a series of waves of doubt. Stars that are too old, galaxies that are too early, a microwave background that is too smooth – every few months astrophysicists encounter data that don't want to fit. Some things soon turn out to be observational errors, others the theory can be adapted to, and some things remain puzzling. The same goes for the models from the early days of the cosmos. There shouldn't be too early, too much - be it elements or stars, somehow the baby universe was obviously more complex than we thought it would be.
The results of European astronomers led by Olivier Le Fèvre from the University of Provence Aix-Marseille I also point in this direction. They studied distant galaxies whose light traveled around eleven billion years before it hit earth. A look back at the youth of the universe, which at that time was only ten to twenty percent of its current age. The data came from a narrow-band infrared image (around 810 nanometers wavelength) by the Visible Multi-Object Spectrograph (VIMOS) on the Very Large Telescope in Chile, known as the Deep Survey (VVDS). It shows a small section of the constellation of the whale (Cetus), in which particularly distant galaxies can be recognized by the red shift of their light.
The counting of the galaxies brought a surprise: 970 specimens with an age between nine and twelve billion years were found. This corresponds to more than double the number found in previous studies. There was also evidence of rapid star formation of tens to hundreds of solar masses per year, which had previously been estimated to be lower.
All in all, the galaxies in the early universe formed much faster and in greater numbers than theory would have it. Considered on its own, this only gives a slight tremor to the thought structure. In combination with the many other inconsistencies, however, it could be another harbinger of the great earthquake that puts the idea of the development of the cosmos to a severe test. We can be curious what the seismology of astronomical knowledge has in store for us in the future.
