Some astronomers say the James Webb images refute the Big Bang theory

In recent days, an article has circulated on the Internet claiming that images taken by the James Webb Telescope (JWST) have refuted the big bang theory.

The JWST is capable of seeing the earliest times of the universe. However, an article titled “The Big Bang Didn\’t Happen” claims that the JWST images somehow “caused panic among cosmologists” because they contradict the Big Bang theory.

The article\’s author, Eric Lerner, goes on to quote another astronomer, Allison Kirkpatrick of the University of Kansas:

“Right now I\’m awake at 3 in the morning wondering if I\’ve done it all wrong.”

“A friend warned me about this article and now I can\’t stop getting emails applauding my bravery in screwing up the Big Bang,” she tweeted.

Kirkpatrick discussed several new data showing that galaxies have disks much earlier than we expected. Although this may require adjustments in the theories of galaxy formation, she does not revise the Big Bang theory at all, to which she Kirkpatrick did not refer.

In fact, Ella Kirkpatrick suggests that the JWST images “support the Big Bang model because they show us that the first galaxies were different from the galaxies we see today: they were much smaller.”

In one part of the article, Lerner seems to suggest that older stars have been discovered than the Big Bang theory would allow, and that since the JWST can see the color of distant galaxies, the red color of distant galaxies means that they contain very old stars

“According to the Big Bang theory, the most distant galaxies in the JWST images are seen as they were only 400-500 million years after the beginning of the universe,” Lerner wrote.

“However, some galaxies have already shown stellar populations older than a billion years. Since nothing could have come into existence before the Big Bang, the existence of these galaxies proves that there was no Big Bang.”

But as Brian Keating points out, “first we have to make sure that the calibration between redshift and distance is done” because the expansion of the universe causes a redshift.

At best, the papers Lerner cites suggest that we may need to revise our theories of galaxy formation to explain how stellar disks appeared so quickly.