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THE James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) 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.

The enormous galaxies – each 100 billion times the mass of our sun and almost as massive as the Milky Way – are more than 12.8 billion years old and formed less than a billion years after the Big Bang.

This means that the stars within these galaxies merged at a disconcerting rate; so fast that they call into question existing models of galaxy formation. The researchers published their results on November 13 in the journal Nature.

“Finding three such massive beasts among the sample poses a tantalizing puzzle,” study co-author Stijn Wuytsprofessor of astronomy at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom, said in a statement. “Many processes in the evolution of galaxies tend to introduce a limiting step in the efficiency with which gas can convert into stars, but somehow these red monsters appear to have quickly avoided the most of these obstacles.”

The conventional wisdom among astronomers is that galaxies form within gigantic halos of dark matter, whose powerful gravity draws ordinary matter such as gas and dust inward before compressing it to form stars.

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Generally, this is considered a fairly inefficient process, since only 20% of the incoming gas ends up as stars. The discovery of the red monsters contradicts this view, with up to 80% of their gas apparently converted into bright young stars.

“These results indicate that galaxies from the early Universe could form stars with unexpected efficiency,” lead author of the study Meng Yuan Xiaoa researcher from the University of Geneva, said in the statement. “As we study these galaxies in more depth, they will offer new insights into the conditions that shaped the earliest epochs of the Universe. The Red Monsters are just the beginning of a new era in our exploration of the early Universe.”

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The red monsters, which get their nickname from their distinctive red glow, were spotted using JWST’s Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam), a spectrograph that studies distant light by splitting it into its constituent parts. JWST’s infrared capabilities allow it to peer deeper and into parts of the early universe more obscured by dust than other telescopes.

The researchers’ next steps will be to make further observations of the red monsters using the JWST telescope and Chile’s Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) telescope. These findings also raise questions for astrophysicists working on models of early galaxy evolution, who may need to consider unique processes that allowed giant galaxies to develop with such efficient star formation.

“In its first years of operation, JWST threw us some challenges,” Wuyts said. “In more ways than one, this showed us that some galaxies mature rapidly during the early chapters of cosmic history.”