Ben Turner is a U.K. based staff writer at Live Science. He covers physics and astronomy, among other topics like tech and climate change. He graduated from University College London with a degree in particle physics before training as a journalist.
The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted a trio of gigantic"red monster" galaxies in the early universe, and they could rewrite our understanding of how stars and galaxies first formed.
"Finding three such massive beasts among the sample poses a tantalising puzzle," study co-author Stijn Wuyts, a professor of astronomy at the University of Bath in the U.K., said in a statement."Many processes in galaxy evolution have a tendency to introduce a rate-limiting step in how efficiently gas can convert into stars, yet somehow these Red Monsters appear to have swiftly evaded most of these hurdles.
Typically, this is seen as a fairly inefficient process, with just 20% of the infalling gas ending up as stars. The discovery of the red monsters confounds this view, with as much of 80% of their gas seemingly converted into bright young stars. RELATED STORIES—13 billion-year-old 'streams of stars' discovered near Milky Way's center may be earliest building blocks of our galaxy—Newly discovered 'fountain of youth' phenomenon may help stars delay death by billions of years
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