Astronomers are reveling in the James Webb Space Telescope’s discoveries about the formative epoch of cosmic history.
The galaxies were never supposed to be so bright. They were never supposed to be so big. And yet there they are — oddly large, luminous objects that keep appearing in images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).Kevin Hainline(opens a new tab) is part of a team that uses the JWST to find these galaxies, whose brightness, apparent mass, and sheer existence a virtual eyeblink after the Big Bang are among the biggest surprises from the three-year-old mission. And these findings have raised a lot of questions. In August, Hainline and other researchers came together at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) in Santa Barbara, California, to hash them all out.“People were saying, ‘Well, Kevin, it can’t be that,’” he told me. “And the observers are like, ‘Well, this is what we see,’ and then theorists can go figure it out and mess around.”After the first morning of the conference, I found Hainline in the courtyard. The new discoveries I had been hearing about seemed revolutionary, perhaps even paradigm-shifting. I wanted to check my reaction with one of the people doing the actual work. Were these results as extraordinary as I, a reporter, thought they were?“We are knocking on the door of history,” Hainline assured me. “Astronomers need to be better about celebrating discoveries.”