When, and How Large?

A couple of articles in the magazine Astronomy highlight that science is about changing and reacting when researchers encounter new data.

In its September issue. Richard Turcott wrote an article about how the galaxies visible to the James Webb Space Telescope were among some of the oldest in our universe. But they were quite a bit larger than they should be. Modern cosmology's most widely accepted theories suggest that old galaxies would have been small. This was a tough piece of info that doesn't match most accepted theories of the creation and development of the universe. Were they wrong? Should they be re-thought?

Then, in an August 31 article on the website (which came out later than the issue because of print publication deadlines) Paul Sutter describes how astronomers may have been using an inaccurate measuring stick to determine distance. Rather than being far away, those galaxies were closer and thus of appropriate size.

Now astronomers and cosmologists have to study the matter to see which is which. If the galaxies are old and far away, some theories need changing. If they are close and ordinary, then the measuring methods for a lot of galaxies might need to be changed. Either way, people who understood things one way had to change their ideas when new evidence cropped up.

That's action that can be worthwhile in a lot of places.