The James Webb Space Telescope's Cycle One programs began by mid-2022 and spent dozens of hours observing small portions of sky searching for distant galaxies in the early universe, but astronomers were surprised to immediately discover galaxies that must have existed within the first 200 million years after the Big Bang, rather than finding a refined version of the Hubble Deep Field as expected.

GLZ 13 is a galaxy with a redshift of 13.1 that existed in the first 300 million years of the universe and has a mass of approximately one billion solar masses.

Within the first second after the Big Bang, all four known fundamental forces separated from each other, and the universe existed as an incredibly hot and dense soup of primordial particles.

Over the next three minutes after the Big Bang as the cosmos expanded and cooled, nuclei of helium and other very light elements began to form.

Approximately 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe cooled enough for the first atoms to appear.

The first stars were born approximately 150 million years after the Big Bang, ending the Dark Ages of the universe.

According to standard cosmological models, proto-galaxies merge through a complex process thought to take approximately one billion years to form large galaxies.

Webb is an infrared observatory that can easily explore regions of the cosmos that even Hubble could not reach due to its infrared capabilities.

Even if all available material in the early universe were converted into stars, it would be insufficient to produce a galaxy as massive as GLZ 13 with a billion solar masses in the first 300 million years, contradicting current star formation models.

If star formation was happening very quickly and efficiently in the early universe (as GLZ 13 suggests), this rapid efficiency should be observable in modern-day galaxies, but it is not, creating a disconnect between early and late universe star formation behavior.

Webb's observations are difficult to explain with the standard Lambda-CDM model of cosmology, where Lambda refers to dark energy and CDM refers to dark matter.

Magnetic fields may have arisen earlier in the universe than previously thought, playing a significant role in driving material and kick-starting star birth, as a potential explanation for rapid early galaxy formation.

Galaxies in the early universe may have had little or no dust, making them appear brighter than they would if they contained dust like modern galaxies, and this reduced dust could partially explain Webb's observations of exceptionally bright early galaxies.

Webb's initial observations may support the controversial idea of Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), which proposes that dark matter does not exist and that large-scale gravitational fluctuations can instead explain the effects attributed to dark matter.

A significant number of observations can be explained by MOND instead of the Lambda-CDM model, and Webb's initial observations align with MOND's predictions.

Although the James Webb Space Telescope has detected dozens of galaxies that do not fit standard cosmological models, this does not mean the Big Bang theory is wrong, because the Big Bang has been developed over the past century with many observational pieces of evidence that cannot be simply ignored.

The observed redshift of distant galaxies aligns with Big Bang model predictions, as the light from distant galaxies has been stretched by the time it reaches us, making it appear redder than it should, with observations showing that essentially everything in the universe is moving apart.

If you could reverse time and run the universe backward, galaxies would get progressively closer together, and going back far enough, all matter in the universe would have been in one place, exactly as Big Bang theory predicts.

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) was proposed theoretically on the basis of Big Bang theory in 1948 and was discovered empirically in 1965, providing perhaps the most convincing evidence for Big Bang cosmology.

Webb's Cycle One observations demonstrate that current models of star formation and galaxy evolution require significant revisions to accommodate the observations of early, unexpectedly massive galaxies.