JWST Found a Galaxy That Shouldn’t Exist

Ajouté : 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]In 2026, the James Webb Space Telescope spotted a galaxy 12 billion light-years away.

[00:00:05]It's called XMM-2275.

[00:00:08]This galaxy is already massive, several times larger than the Milky Way, but it has stopped forming stars. Normally, massive galaxies only stop spinning after billions of years of mergers, but this galaxy existed when the universe was only 1.8 billion years old. JWST's near-infrared spectrograph mapped the motion of its stars. They move in random directions with a spin parameter of just 0.123, the same as the oldest elliptical galaxies we see nearby. It's dead, and it's not spinning. Unlike young galaxies we expect to see in the early universe, this challenges our models of galaxy formation. [music] Either early galaxies can stop spinning far faster than we thought, or our understanding of how galaxies evolve is incomplete. JWST [music] is showing us the universe doesn't always follow the rules we set. The universe is already older than we imagined, >> [music] >> and we're only beginning to see its secrets.