The first findings of the James Webb telescope might revolutionize the views of the formation of galaxies

The first preliminary findings of the James Webb telescope, the successor of the Hubble telescope, are in conflict with the standard view of the formation of galaxies. The YouTube video (see this) "James Webb Found Galaxies That Sort of Break Modern Theories" gives a good summary of these findings. The findings are also summarized in an article in Nature (see this) with the title "Four revelations from the Webb telescope about distant galaxies".

The official story of the formation of galaxies goes roughly as follows.

1. Around 3 minutes of cosmic time, the cosmic microwave background emerged as the first atoms formed and radiation decoupled from matter.
2. When the age of the Universe was more than about .1 billion years, the first stars were formed. They lived their life and exploded as supernovas and yielded interstellar hydrogen gas. Galaxies started to form. One can see this process as a gravitational condensation. What is essential is that this process went from long to short scales, just as the formation of stars in the earlier phase.
3. The model gives a stringent upper bound for the age of the galaxies. They should be younger than the oldest observed stars. This limit gives an upper bound for the distance of the galaxy, that is for its redshift.

The first, preliminary, observations of the James Webb telescope were galaxies with redshifts up to 16. Even redsshift extending to 20 have been speculated in arXiv papers. Redshift 16 would correspond to the age of 250 million years and redshift of 20 to the age of 200 million years. They are too far to fit into the official picture. To get some perspective, note that the estimate for the age of the Universe is 13.8 billion years.

The ages of these galaxies were few hundred million years and of the same order as the estimated ages of about 100 million years of the hypothetical population III stars (see this), which are thought to be the oldest stars but have not not (yet?) detected. The criterion for the age of the star is its metal content: the first stars should have contained only hydrogen and Helium and "metal" here means anything heavier than Helium. The suggestive conclusion is that there was a significant population of star forming galaxies in the early universe. This challenges the standard view stating that stars came first and led to the formation of galaxies.

TGD proposes an unofficial view of the formation of galaxies (see this, this and this).

1. In the very beginning the Universe was dominated by cosmic strings, which were space-time surfaces in H=M⁴× CP₂ having 2-dimensional M⁴ projection. They were not "Einsteinian" space-time surfaces with 4-D M⁴ projection and have no counterpart in general relativity.
2. Cosmic strings were unstable against thickening of the M⁴ projection to 4-D one. Phase transitions thickening the cosmic strings occurred and increased their thickness and reduced string tension so that part of their energy transformed to ordinary matter. This is the TGD counterpart for inflation.

   This process led to radiation dominated Universe and the local description of the Universe as an Einsteinian 4-surface became a good approximation and is used in standard cosmology based on the standard model as a QFT limit of TGD.

   At this moment the thickness of the thickened strings would be around 100 micrometers, which corresponds to a length scale around large neuron size. Water blob with this size has mass of order Planck mass. The connection with biology is suggestive \cite{btart/penrose,watermorpho,waterbridge}.

3. The liberated dark energy (and possible dark matter, dark in the TGD sense) assignable to cosmic strings produced quasars, which in the TGD framework are identified as time reversals of the ordinary galactic blackholes. They did not extract matter from the environment but feeded darl energy as matter to the environment as jets. Jets are observed and explained in terms of the magnetic field due to the rotation of the galaxy.

   The jets are somewhat problematic in the GRT based cosmology since the simplest, non-rotating Schwarzschild blackholes do not allow them. The rotating blackholes identifiable as Kerr-Newman blackholes accompanied by magnetic fields, also have some interpretational problems. For instance, the arrow of time can be said to be different in the nearby and faraway regions and closed time-like geodesics are possible. In TGD, this could have an interpretation in terms of zero energy ontology (ZEO). The matter from the jets would have eventually led to the formation of atoms, stars, and galaxies.

4. What is essential is that the formation of galaxies proceeds from short to long scales rather than vice versa as in the standard cosmology. A second essential point is that the dark energy (and possible dark matter) concentrated at cosmic strings was added to the ordinary matter predicted by the standard model to be present in the radiation dominated cosmology. This led to the formation of galaxies. Therefore this picture is consistent with the standard story as far as the formation of atoms and emergence of CMB is considered.

The possibility considered in the TGD framework (see this, this and this) is that quasars are time reversed black-holes (this property can be formulated precisely in zero energy ontology (ZEO), which forms the basis of TGD based quantum measurement theory) (see this, this and this). Note that the time reversal property would hold true in long time scales at the magnetic body (MB) defined by the monopole flux tubes produced by the thickening of the cosmic strings. For ordinary matter, the scale for the time spent with a given arrow of time is very short but MB with a large gravitational Planck constant can force ordinary matter to effectively behave like its time reversed version.

There is indeed quite recent support for the proposal that quasars are time reversals of blackhole-like objects identified in the TGD framework as monopole flux tube tangles. The Hubble telescope detected a dwarf galaxy at a distance of 30 million light years for which the number of stars is about 10 per cent for that in the Milky Way. Its center contains a blackhole-like object (see this), which did not extract matter from the environment but did just the opposite by jets, which gave rise to a formation of stars.

The observations challenging the basic dogma of blackhole physics are not new and during the writing of an article about galactic jets I got the impression that one of the basic challenges is to explain why some blackholes do just the opposite of what they should do.

See the article TGD View of the Engine Powering Jets from Active Galactic Nuclei or the chapter with the same title.

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

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