The universe's first galaxies were hot messes, according to a recent study. During their younger days, they were wild, chaotic bundles of turbulent gas, churned up by huge gulps of intergalactic gas, bursts of massive star formation, and raging supermassive black holes.
The team of astronomers suggesting this idea, led by Cambridge University's Lola Dunhaive, recently pointed the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) at 272 small galaxies, dating back to between 800 million and 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. The universe was still very young (in astronomical terms) when the light from these galaxies began its journey to our corner of the cosmos; now that this light has arrived to the JWST's eye, scientists saw the faraway galaxies looking dramatically different from the mature, sedately rotating disks we see in the nearby universe.
