The discovery of (potentially) six galaxies that contain more gas than was thought to exist in the entire universe put together was nothing short of a “spitting out my coffee moment” for lead researcher Professor Ivo Labbé.
“We were looking at the kindergarten of a universe,” Labbé told Crikey. “At kinder you expect to see toddlers. The average toddler weighs eight to 10 kilograms. What did we find? Toddlers that weigh 100kg but they’re only five centimetres tall.”
“Very, very strange.”
His team at Swinburne University of Technology used the James Webb Space Telescope to launch a search party to look back to approximately 600 million years after the big bang. When Labbé sighted the monstrosity that was in the order of 100 billion times the mass of the sun, “a lot of four-letter words” were dropped.
“When you’re looking at lots of images through telescopes, you start to get a feel of what you might see,” he said. “But when I saw this, I thought, ‘Uh oh this shouldn’t be there’.”
Labbé immediately called a red alert and summoned all hands on deck to try to find more of these gigantic — yet utterly compressed — baby editions of galaxies. And he did.
In a record two to three days, his team had whipped up a report paper (a process that usually takes months) and caused quite the stir in the scientific community. After four months of “proving to our critics why our methods were valid”, the findings were published today in Nature.
So what exactly is so “big” and out of sorts about a galaxy “more massive than your average adult but also 30 times smaller”? In short, it runs headlong into all manner of theoretical limits.
Scientists have the tools to calculate the amount of gas in the universe at a given point in time. The problem, Labbé said, was that the amount of gas believed to have existed at 600 million years ABB (a non-scientific acronym coined by Crikey that stands for “after big bang”) was the amount of gas required to produce just a few of these monster galaxies.
“If the entire universe of gas is used to create these, then that’s not enough gas,” he said, running the numbers for Crikey.
Current cosmological theory is based on the premise that galaxies start small and grow big as they age. Also, like humans, they are creatures of waste, using only 5% to 10% of the gas given to them at conception for the designated purpose of making stars.
“You basically need 100 buckets of gas to build five buckets of stars,” Labbé said. Everything else goes to waste.
There is nothing in space handbooks to account for a galactic fast-track channel that not only gives birth to big babies, but does so with 100% gas-to-star efficiency. We’re talking zero waste.
The six potential (officially called “candidate”) galaxies require further investigation and verification before they’re eligible to reconfigure the rules for the making of a universe. Currently, the astronomical revelations are based on a few red dots — mere “smudges of light” that offer “limited detail”.
To ensure the images are what they claim to be, Labbé said his team would roll in the spectrograph. This splits the pinpricks of light and will allow the researchers to see what it’s made of and where it’s coming from.
Labbé gives it six to 12 months to properly test whether these massive systems are breaking theory, but he’s confident he’s at the forefront of a “once-in-a-generation” scientific revolution: “The universe is a lot weirder than the human imagination. You couldn’t make these things up.”
