How the Universe’s Largest Map Changes the Big Bang Theory

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AForeigners recently published the largest card in the universe, withdrawing more than 13 billion years, which revealed a surprise: many galaxies were already very advanced in the first phases of the universe – much more than expected by the theory of Big Bang of creation.

The new results will be used to modify the theory of the Big Bang so that it corresponds better to what is observed, explains the astrophysicist Jeyhan Kartaltepe of the Rochester Institute of Technology. “What we have to modify is our understanding of how the stars have formed in the very early universe, what were the physical properties of this initial gas which they formed and how quickly they have formed.”

Kartaltepe and the University of California, the physicist of Santa Barbara Caitlin Casey has been working together for two years to transform the raw data of the James Webb space telescope (JWST) into an image of the universe through the deep time that anyone can explore. The final result of this project, called Cosmos-Web Field Project, is now online: a composite of 800,000 sparkling galaxies.

The map contains vast “galactic walls”, structures in the shape of concentrated galaxies and empty space empty.

Thanks to the more powerful and advanced observation techniques of James Webb, this new image is more than 150 times larger than a previous version created by Hubble in 2004, and shows almost 80 times more galaxies – many of them as our own milky path.

Astronomers have long been thinking that the oldest galaxies in the universe have formed a few hundred years after the Big Bang, which occurred 13.8 billion years ago. Kartaltepe and Casey were therefore surprised to note that so many of these galaxies were already very advanced from 13.5 billion years ago – with well -defined structures and older stars – and that some had light specters that showed supermassive black holes to their nuclei.

This suggests that the galaxies have formed much earlier than expected and therefore Big Bang theory will have to be adjusted, says Kartaltepe. She also hopes that the individual observations of James Webb in the mosaic image will be used as online resource by astronomers studying the evolution of galaxies: the set of samples of 800,000 galaxies is so large that it includes many examples of almost all types of galaxies, with almost all stages of evolution.

“Field Deep” images like the Cosmos-Web image not only tell the story of the universe, but they can also help us locate our own galaxy in space and time. The large scales mapped on the image, around 13.5 billion light years, which reach the oldest and oldest galaxies in the universe, is unprecedented. The card contains evidence of large “galactic walls”, structures in the shape of concentrated galaxies and empty space empty.

One of these walls is the large Sloan wall, about 1 billion light years and the largest known structure in the universe. But each branch and knot of the cosmic canvas seems to collapse slowly under the effects of gravity, while the voids grow more and more.

“Videes push galaxies outside,” explains astrophysicist Noam Libeskind of Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics from Germany to Potsdam. “They are like inflated balloons.”

The universe is in flow, as is our understanding of this one.

Main art: Six images of galaxies taken from almost 800,000, from top to left to the right right: the current universe and 3, 4, 8, 9 and 10 billion years. Credit: M. Franco / C. Casey / Cosmos-Web Collaboration.

• Tom Metcalfe

  Published on June 26, 2025

  Tom Metcalfe is a scientific journalist based in London, where he writes mainly on space, energy, archeology, earth and oceans. He wrote for Scientific American, National Geographic, Live Science, NBC News, BBC News, and others.