The awkward moment when you find out there was no Big Bang

"Early results from the James Webb Space Telescope appear to show that massive, bright galaxies were already forming within the first 250 millions years after the Big Bang", he says the Sky and Telescope.

"If confirmed, this would seriously challenge our current cosmological thinking."

Shortly after NASA published the first scientific data from the James Webb Space Telescope, the arXiv astronomy server was flooded with documents claiming the detection of galaxies so distant that their light took about 13,5 billion years to reach Earth.

Many of them appear to be more massive than the standard cosmological model that describes the composition and evolution of the universe.

"I'm slightly concerned that we're finding these monsters in the first images," says cosmologist Richard Ellis (University College London).

Before the scientific community accepts these claims, the reported shifts must be confirmed spectroscopically. Mark McCaughrean, senior scientific advisor to the European Space Agency (and a Webb collaborator) reported in Twitter:

"I'm sure some of them will be confirmed, but I'm equally sure not all of them will be confirmed."

Ellis agrees: "It's easy to put a paper on arXiv, but it's quite another to turn it into an article in a peer-reviewed journal."

Since 1991, science writer Eric Lerner has argued that the Big Bang never happened. He is now 75, and reports:

"In the flood of technical astronomical papers published in thenetwork since July 12, the authors have repeatedly reported that the images show surprisingly many galaxies, galaxies that are surprisingly smooth, surprisingly small, and surprisingly old. Lots of surprises and not necessarily pleasant ones. The title of a paper begins with the honest exclamation: "Panic!"

Why are JWST images causing cosmologists to panic? And what theories do they contradict? The papers don't say.

The truth these papers don't mention is that the JWST images blatantly and repeatedly contradict the Big Bang hypothesis that the universe began 14 billion years ago in an incredibly hot, dense state and has been expanding ever since.

This hypothesis has been defended for decades as an indisputable truth by the vast majority of cosmological theorists, Naturally the new data causes panic among these theorists.

"Right now I wake up at three in the morning," says Alison Kirkpatrick, an astronomer at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, "and I wonder if everything I've done is wrong...".

Galaxies with more brightness and mass than our own Milky Way appear in these images to be two to three times smaller than in similar images observed with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). The new galaxies also appear to be two to three times larger. This is not at all to be expected in an expanding universe.

Big Bang theorists expected to see tangled galaxies jumbled up by many collisions or mergers. What JWST actually showed were overwhelmingly smooth discs and neat spirals. The elements in the draft “Panic!” show that smooth spiral galaxies were about "10 times" more numerous than predicted by theory and that this would "challenge our ideas about mergers being a very common process". In plain language, this data completely destroys the merger theory.

According to the Big Bang theory, the most distant galaxies in the JWST images are seen as they were only 400-500 million years after the origin of the universe. However, already some of the galaxies have shown stellar populations older than a billion years. Since nothing could have come before the Big Bang, the existence of these galaxies indicates that the Big Bang did not happen….