The James Webb telescope has discovered massive galaxies the size of the Milky Way, filled with old stars that have baffled astronomers. According to existing ideas, galaxies should not have existed, according to Space. com.

The galaxies are so far away that they look like red dots in the pictures taken by the telescope.. After analyzing the light that they emit, scientists came to the conclusion that the objects appeared 500-700 thousand years after the Big Bang..

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The existence of such ancient galaxies in itself was not a surprise.. Astronomers believe that the first stars appeared when the universe emerged from the so-called dark times - the first 400 thousand years of its existence..

But the galaxies found in the James Webb images are surprisingly large, and the stars in them are too old.. New discovery contradicts existing ideas about how the universe looked and developed in the early years. In addition, they do not match the observations made by the predecessor of James Webb, the Hubble telescope..

“We had certain expectations about the type of galaxies that existed in the early universe: they are young and small.. Previous studies of the early universe with Hubble and other instruments have tended to find small, blue, young galaxies in early times: objects that very recently formed from the primordial cosmic soup and build their own early stars and structures,” said one.

Young stars glow blue, but become more reddish as they age.. In the ancient galaxies that James Webb found, astronomers did not expect to see old red stars. Besides, they didn't think they could see galaxies larger than a billion suns.. But the reddish galaxies detected by the telescope are 50 times more massive than scientists expected..

Previously, " Previously, its existence was indicated by data from the TESS telescope..