The Brief

The James Webb Space Telescope is the most powerful telescope ever put into space. As such, its helping usher in a new era of astrophysics. Astronomers can now study farther, earlier galaxies than ever before.

"If you were a paleontologist, you would dig deeper and deeper to find the oldest bones. In astronomy, what we do is look at our history," says Jorge Moreno, an associate professor of astronomy at Pomona College. "We have to look back in time, but we don't have a time machine. So what we do is we look at really faraway distances."

As they peer into the deep, distant history of the universe, scientists are shocked to find galaxies showed in our cosmic history much sooner than scientists ever expected.

It's a galactic controversy that has astronomers around the world excited — and puzzled.

So what is it about these galaxies that is getting astronomers worked up? Not only is JWST finding galaxies forming 200-500 million years after the Big Bang, but also that they are bigger and brighter than astronomers expected.

Using light to peer into the past

The farthest galaxies seen by the telescope are also some of the earliest galaxies in our universe. The James Webb Space Telescope can see them because it is picking up the faint light emitted by them.

By the time light from these far reaches of the universe approaches the telescope, it is in the infrared range of light, and no longer viewable to the naked eye. The light visible to humans is just a fraction of the total range of light on the electromagnetic spectrum.

Cosmological redshift is the process by which wavelengths of light elongate as they travel through the expanding universe.

(

NASA and A. Feild (STScI)

)

This light has been traveling a long time by the time it reaches the telescope. For reference, it takes around eight minutes for light to travel from the sun to your eye. Light from Proxima Centauri, the nearest stellar neighbor of the sun, takes a little over four years to reach us here on earth.

Seeing a teenager when you expect a kindergartener

Light is a double-edged sword in the context of these galaxies. Its what lets us study the galaxies. But there's so much more of it than astronomers would have expected.

The brightness of a galaxy can be related to its mass, because a galaxy's light comes from stars. If you assume a certain average brightness and mass of a star, you can roughly estimate the mass of a galaxy.

But much of the modeling astronomers have done up to this point has led them to believe that there wasn't enough time for galaxies to get this massive in so little time.

"It's like if you went to a kindergarten and you saw a teenager," says Moreno.

However, Moreno says this assumption that brightness equates to mass may not always be accurate. For example, there could be an active supermassive black hole at the center of these early galaxies with bright accretion disks or high energy jets that would make the galaxies seem artificially massive. Or, if there's hot dust in the galaxies—which looks very bright in the infrared wavelengths picked up by the James Webb Space Telescope—that too would make the galaxies seem more massive than they are.

When young galaxies are advanced for their age

Most galaxies are separated into two types: spirals, which are disk-like with arms of dust and gas; and ellipticals, which are more like spheres of smooth light.

Until now, scientists thought that any galaxies from this relatively early period in the history of the universe would have been too young to have been forced into that binary yet. Instead, astronomers thought the galaxies would be ... blobs. But Moreno and other astronomers like him are excited to now be studying what look like pretty highly structured galaxies.

"Some of them look a lot like galaxies in the local universe," he says. "They seem to have added structure and maybe even spiral arms. That wasn't something we really expected."

The high level of structure and brightness in these galaxies is leading some astrophysicists to question the age of the universe.

The universe doesn't look a day over 13.8 billion years old

Roughly.

In an attempt to explain the shockingly bright, highly structured — and possibly quite massive — galaxies existing so early in the timeline of the universe, a researcher has posited that the universe is roughly twice as old as previously believed. They push the age of the universe from a spry 13.8 billion years old to roughly 26.7 billion years old.

An article published earlier this year in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society came to this conclusion after combining two models of the universe. One is the commonly accepted model for the expansion of the universe. This model explains that as the universe expands, the light from galaxies must travel further and therefore shifts from a bluer to a redder spectrum of light. The other model it is combined with has been debunked. It's called the tired light model, and it alleges that as light travels across the universe, it gets redder because it gets "tired," or loses energy.

Moreno says that while he thinks that combining the models is clever, it is not supported by scientific evidence.

"I think in science, if you already have a model that's simpler than that, you should stick to it—unless you have extraordinary evidence to do otherwise."

Moreno also cautions people against quickly jumping on this supposition that the universe is twice as old as previously thought. If it were true, scientists would be able to prove it through the direct observation of stars and galaxies that are older than 13.8 billion years old—the current accepted age of the universe.

No such evidence has been found.

Pausing to take in ancient, galactic wisdom

NASA receives more data from the James Webb Space Telescope everyday—and with additional data comes possibilities for new solutions.

But for Moreno, pausing for reflective moments about the conclusions we make based on observations are also important.

So too, are lessons from these galaxies, which Moreno notes alternately go through periods of brightening and dimming. "I think that's something we need to learn from them—that it's important to just have times where we're really excited to discover things. But there are times where we need to quiet down, take a break and really think through things clearly and slowly."

This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Berly McCoy. Anil Oza checked the facts. Josh Newell was the audio engineer. Special thanks to James Davenport.

Geffen Playhouse Artistic Director Tarell Alvin McCraney won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for the movie Moonlight, but don't expect to see him at this year's Oscars ceremony.

"I tend to stay away from the awards show," McCraney said. " I think I might have PTSD."

McCraney is referring to the viral moment from the 2017 Oscars ceremony, where La La Land was mistakenly announced as the Best Picture winner instead of Moonlight.

McCraney isn't new to theater. In fact, you could consider it his original home before his play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue launched him into the Hollywood spotlight. But when the Geffen Playhouse asked him to be their artistic director two years ago, it called him back to the stage in a different way. Tapping a screenwriter for the position was a first for the theater, but McCraney said the roles actually overlap in more ways than one.

 "The job of the screenwriter most times is to make sure that everybody is understanding where the story is going and what the 'action' of the piece is," McCraney said. "So it's not that much different than being an artistic director.  My job here is to set the artistic goal for the organization. [To] point out its virtues and pitfalls, the dangers and the obstacles, and then move collectively as a single storyteller towards that goal."

McCraney said one of the great things about living in Los Angeles is its nuanced racial and ethnic communities, and he rides his bike around the city to better experience them.

"The landscape is constantly shifting and changing," McCraney said. "For example, Westwood has drastically changed over the past 15 years and will change irrevocably with the coming of the new train station down on Wilshire. It will change again with LA28 happening."

Just like Los Angeles, the Geffen Playhouse has had multiple transformations over its more than 30 year existence. Their world premier show, Silvia Silvia Silvia, is playing until March 8. Dragon Mama, starring Sarah Porkalob, begins March 4.

"Sarah is an incredible singer and writer and has created this incredible arc through a family that is both powerful and witty, but also deeply nuanced," McCraney said. "She's sharing that family with us, and family is our first community. They are the people we learn the most from. We learn unconditional love. We learn collective bargaining. Investigating family, investigating why we stay together and how we stay together through dire circumstances is a critical investigation for us right now."

When it comes to this year's Oscars ceremony, McCraney said he's rooting for all the nominees.

"It's been an incredible season," he said. "But Sinners is an incredible film that I've seen three or four times, so I'm really excited to see how it does."

The Long Beach Community College District has agreed to pay $18 million to more than 1,450 part-time professors to settle a class-action lawsuit that alleged they were forced to work unpaid hours outside the classroom, grading papers and tests, meeting with students, preparing lessons and other duties.

The settlement, which the district board quietly approved last month, still needs the judge overseeing the case to sign off. A hearing on the matter is scheduled for July 1 in Los Angeles County Superior Court. It’s likely that Judge Stuart Rice will approve the deal. Last year, he ruled that the part-timers, commonly called adjuncts, were entitled to the pay they sought, writing he found “a myriad of problems” with the district’s claims that its practices did not violate state law.

The case has made “a major impact throughout the state already,” as some districts have begun negotiating contract terms to give adjuncts what they’ve long sought — pay for time they spend prepping and grading, not just for class time, said the plaintiffs’ lawyer Eileen B. Goldsmith, in an interview. (EdSource published an investigative series in the issue, Gig By Gig At California’s Community Colleges, in 2022.)

The Long Beach district recently set aside $20 million for the settlement and associated costs, its spokesperson, Stacey Toda, told the Long Beach Post in an email. “Resolving this matter allows the District to avoid prolonged litigation and manage risk responsibly, consistent with standard practices across public higher education,” Toda wrote.

The settlement “is a big deal, it is tremendous,” said John Martin, chair of the California Part-Time Faculty Association, and a community college adjunct professor in Shasta and Butte counties.

Martin, a long-time advocate for better pay for adjuncts, is also the plaintiff in similar ongoing lawsuits, including one against the state Community College system.

In legal papers filed in the Superior Court, Goldsmith wrote that the proposed settlement, if approved, will result in 1,456 class members receiving more than “$11,000 — a very meaningful result for these class members, particularly given the novel issues in this litigation.”

The Long Beach Post contributed to this story.