"Finally Proven: There Was No Big Bang" James Webb Telescope Just Saw Galaxies Much Older Than...

The universe is actually very old, but not infinitely old, so that was a big surprise, too. Einstein thought, of course, the universe must have an infinite age. Without a starting point, well, he was wrong. So our intuition has just been wrong almost all the time. We're pretty confident that we don't know what we're going to find. In a new paper published recently, scientists have revealed that new images from the Webb telescope have discovered objects just 120 million years after the Big Bang. Astronomers say that we did not expect to see something like this in the Webb image. The universe is actually very old, but not infinitely old. Consider this. When the Webb telescope looks as far into space as possible, it will only see about 46.5 billion light-years away. This is the radius of our visible universe, which we call the Hubble radius, or Hubble sphere. By the way, the most distant galaxies discovered by the James Webb telescope also fall under the Hubble sphere region. The most distant galaxy ever discovered by the Webb telescope when it was launched was the Macy's galaxy, which existed just 450 million years after the Big Bang, also exists inside the Hubble sphere. Now, that spot of most distant galaxy is being held by MOM Z14, existing about 280 million years after the Big Bang, which we have spoken about countless number of times on this channel, so I won't bore you with the details. But we know that our universe is expanding, and as the universe expands, this Hubble region is becoming larger and larger, making it possible for objects beyond this Hubble region to be visible. But here's where it gets really intriguing. The universe isn't just expanding, it's accelerating in its expansion. Beyond the edge of the Hubble sphere, the expansion is happening faster than the speed of light, and because of this, the size of the Hubble region will not increase forever. When we look at extremely distant objects beyond this Hubble boundary, their light is trying to reach us. However, due to the accelerating expansion, the space between us and these far-off objects is stretching so rapidly that the light emitted by them cannot keep up. This means the light from those distant stars and galaxies is effectively moving away from us faster than it can reach us. This means that the Hubble sphere will stop growing once it reaches the cosmic horizon limit, a region called the observable universe. This observable universe is a 93 billion light-year-wide imaginary spherical shell around us. This is the maximum distance up to which we can see galaxies or stars. The light coming from inside this sphere must have been emitting light for a long time so that that light could reach us. Anything outside of this sphere will not visible to us ever. Even with the strongest theoretical telescopes, we cannot see that far because the light from there just isn't here yet. That does raise the question, just how big is the entire universe outside the walls of our observable universe shell? Well, we don't know. But we have estimated, or rather, the maths in some of our current cosmological theories suggest competing answers to this question. Although we do not have enough information to come to any certainties yet, and may never. For all we know, it could be infinite. But some research has indicated that our full universe is at least 250 times larger than our observable universe. There are estimates of our universe being 10 raised to the power of 10 raised to the power of 10 raised to the power of 122 times larger than the observable universe. This represents an astronomically huge number with an incredible number of digits. But the uniform distribution of matter in the universe and the isotropic distribution of temperature in the cosmic microwave background radiation suggest that our universe may be infinite in size. One fascinating aspect of observing the distant universe is that when we look deep into space, we are also looking backward in time. The farthest galaxies we observe near the Hubble sphere are not galaxies as they exist today. Instead, they are galaxies as they appeared billions of years ago. In other words, what we are really seeing is the history of the universe. According to the standard cosmological model, roughly 14 billion years ago, everything within the observable universe, and even regions beyond what we can see, would have been compressed into an extremely small state known as a singularity. This description works if the universe is finite. However, if the universe is actually infinite, which some evidence suggests might be the case, then it may have always been infinite. If that is true, the Big Bang did not occur at a single point in space. Instead, it happened everywhere simultaneously. This would mean the first galaxies did not emerge in one specific region, but instead formed throughout the entire universe, including areas far beyond what we can observe. It appears that matter came into existence everywhere at roughly the same moment, and the cosmic microwave background radiation we detect from all directions represents the earliest light emitted by matter across the universe. From this perspective, the singularity may not have been a single location from which everything expanded. Rather, it could represent an infinite state where matter and energy emerged everywhere at once around 13.8 billion years ago. However, while this explanation aligns with many aspects of modern cosmology, recent discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope are beginning to challenge our understanding of the universe's age. Each deep field image captured by the telescope reveals unexpected objects that push scientists to reconsider parts of the 13.8 billion year Big Bang model. By the end of 2022, astronomers believed the most distant potential galaxy was Kier's 93316, although it had not yet been confirmed. Later research revealed that it was actually a closer galaxy whose light appeared extremely redshifted due to heavy dust, which created a misleading signal. More recently, however, the James Webb Space Telescope identified another extremely distant galaxy candidate that surprised scientists. Researchers discovered F200DB-045, a potential ultra-high redshift galaxy with an estimated redshift of z equals 20.4, corresponding to a time about 168 million years after the Big Bang. If confirmed, this object would rank among the earliest and most distant galaxies ever observed. At the moment, it remains a candidate and must undergo further analysis before it can be verified. But if the discovery holds up, scientists may need to refine the standard cosmological model in order to produce a more accurate estimate of the universe's age. A few months ago, the James Webb Space Telescope revealed something surprising, the presence of massive galaxies that appeared only a few million years after the Big Bang. According to the current standard model of cosmology, galaxies that large should not have formed so quickly. For such galaxies to appear that early, almost all the gas in the universe would have had to convert into stars with nearly 100% efficiency, a scenario that is extremely unlikely. In fact, producing galaxies at that speed is so difficult that many scientists consider it essentially impossible within the framework of our current models. To put this into perspective, our own galaxy, the Milky Way, took billions of years to reach its present size and structure. Yet the James Webb Space Telescope has detected galaxies with similar mass appearing only a short time after the Big Bang. Discoveries like this could dramatically reshape our understanding of how the first galaxies in the universe formed. In another remarkable finding made possible by the Webb Telescope, a research collaboration known as GA-NIFS observed something extraordinary in the early universe. They identified two black holes merging roughly 700 million years after the Big Bang. Thanks to Webb's powerful infrared instruments, scientists were able to detect signals from this ancient cosmic collision. Researchers believe that frequent black hole mergers may have been an important mechanism that allowed black holes to grow rapidly during the early stages of the universe. Taken together, discoveries like these are raising intriguing questions. Some scientists suggest they could imply that the universe might be older than previously estimated, or perhaps that it did not have a single beginning at all. If the universe truly appears infinite in size, it is not unreasonable to consider the possibility that its age could also be infinite. From this perspective, what we call the Big Bang might not represent the absolute beginning of everything. Instead, it could mark a particular phase or transformation in an already existing cosmic system rather than the origin of the universe itself. That said, these ideas remain speculative. Much more research is required to determine whether the concept of an eternal universe without a true beginning can be reconciled with current scientific theories and still explain the complex sequence of events that occurred during the Big Bang. That's all for today. Share your thoughts in the comments about this ongoing crisis in cosmology.