For a long time, astronomers believed galaxy formation followed a very specific model: cosmic gas collects in clumps, stars are born from those clumps, and, over billions of years, stellar neighborhoods gradually increase in size. However, the James Webb Space Telescope, launched in December 2021, has disrupted that model.
In a new study, scientists identified three massive galaxies — dubbed "Red Monsters" — each almost the size of the Milky Way, already in existence just one billion years after the Big Bang. Though that sounds like a really long time, in our 14-billion-year-old universe, just a billion years is relatively early on. These galaxies therefore raise a fundamental question: how did they grow so large, so quickly?
