“Even if only half of Yan’s selection turn out to be nearby galaxies masquerading as distant ones, the latter number would still be unexpectedly large.”
Haojing Yan found 87 candidate galaxies from 200 to 400 million years after the Big Bang behind a single cluster. The CEERS team found mature disk galaxies when models predicted chaos. “Our previously favored picture of galaxy formation in the early universe must be revised,” Yan says. Webb was built to see the first galaxies, and they showed up early and already grown.