In a Galaxy far, far away

This could be where Star Wars took place. Seriously, I don't know about that but it turns out that galaxies formed a lot sooner after the Big Bang than once thought. Some cosmologists are estimating that as soon as 200 million years.

This theory is based on observations of a distant galaxy that has stars that came into existence only 200 million years after the Big Bang, assuming that it came into existence 13.7 billion years ago. What's important to note is that this galaxy is not the only one that's very old. Some have been discovered with younger stars.

This so-called first galaxy was discovered by the Hubble telescope and is designated as GN-z11 and is seen as it was 13.4 billion years ago, so the stars that formed it were only 200 million years after the Big Bang. Or, so it's thought.

This galaxy was seen because of gravity lensing in which a large galaxy cluster, like Able 388, acts as a lens to magnify a much more distant object. This galaxy's red shift is 6.027, which means that the galaxy is 950 million years after the Big Bang. However, the stars in this galaxy appear to be 750 million years old, which means that they were created roughly 200 million years after the Big Bang.

What doesn't make sense is that about 300,000 years after the Big Bang hydrogen was neutral. It must have become ionized again when radiation spit it into protons and electrons, enough so to clear the fog of the early universe and make it transparent. This radiation came from galaxies, indicating that galaxies were around much sooner than thought. They just can't be seen now because they're too far away.

I'm sure that the new James Webb telescope will discover them and lay to rest the argument about when the first galaxies formed in early universe. I can't wait!

Thanks for reading.