There could be many more satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way than previously thought or observed, according to astronomers.
As many as 100 undiscovered galaxies that are too faint to be seen could be surrounding the galaxy that houses Earth and the solar system, new research has found.
Cosmologists at Durham University in England made the discovery using a new technique that combines the highest-resolution supercomputer simulations in existence with mathematical modeling, they announced at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting in Durham on Friday.
The supercomputer predicted the existence of missing "orphan" galaxies -- suggesting that up to 100 or more satellite galaxies are orbiting the Milky Way at close distances.
New observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) suggest the cosmos may be much older than once believed. For decades, scientists have held that the universe is about 13.8 billion years old. That number now faces serious doubt, thanks to the telescope’s groundbreaking data.
The JWST wasn’t just designed for clearer images—it was built to peer deeper into time than ever before. Its precision and range allow it to detect light from the earliest galaxies, opening a window into the universe’s youth. And what it's seeing doesn’t match the script cosmologists have followed for years.
Some of the most puzzling finds have been dubbed “impossible early galaxies.” These ancient structures appear to have formed just 500 to 800 million years after the Big Bang. But that’s where the problem lies: they look far too developed for their supposed age.
Our universe is expanding, so it must have been smaller in the past. Indeed, if we rewind our cosmological movie, we see the universe shrinking back almost to a point – the big bang – some 13.8 billion years ago. Is this when time began? Alas, things aren’t so simple.
Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity tells us that the backdrop of the universe is a fluid continuum, space-time, in which neither space nor time has an absolute meaning. What’s more, at the big bang, space-time distorts into a point of infinite density called a singularity. We can’t say this is where time begins, only that it marks a rupture beyond which we cannot extrapolate.
Even so, some cosmologists believe there was a “before” the big bang. Some suggest that another universe preceded ours, and that this one contracted and then “bounced” at the big bang, resulting in the expanding era we now observe.
More radically, cosmologist Roger Penrose has proposed that new universes can emerge from ones that don’t contract, through a dramatic “rescaling” of all space-time. READ MORE...
