"The models just don't predict this," Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California at Santa Cruz, told WaPo. "How do you do this in the universe at such an early time? How do you form so many stars so quickly?"
While these findings have taken the scientific community by surprise, they're not at all a cause for alarm. Major technological advancements, in astronomy and beyond, have a long history of leading to periods of large-scale scientific discovery. Right now, it really feels like we're in one of those watershed moments, and the discoveries made today may well lay the foundation for future breakthroughs, even if they're decades down the line.
And really, discoveries like this mean that the JWST is doing exactly what scientists want it to do — it's revealing new, exciting stuff about our mind-bogglingly expansive universe, answering old questions and asking new ones along the way.
I mean, this sounds like the process is working the way it's supposed to. The models don't fit the observations, so reexamine the models and find where you went wrong.
I mean, this sounds like the process is working the way it's supposed to. The models don't fit the observations, so reexamine the models and find where you went wrong.