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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

It fits the theme that, according to Webb, the universe developed a lot more quickly in what we think were the first billion years... Most likely the "first billion years" were more like five billion years.

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There is growing evidence that doesn't fit the current model. It's funny how 'age is just a number' may be empirically true in a very existential sense.

Sorry, but can you elaborate on that? In what sense are you thinking of?

In the sense that the point of “age” is supposed to indicate some kind of progress by which cohorts can be compared and classified into discrete groups.

But increasingly, there is no correlation between age and specific developmental stages. It is merely a number that indicates how long something has been around but not what its current status may be.

this doesn't seem to provide much of a justification for an extraordinary claim like "the widely accepted number for the age of the universe is wrong by 4 billion years"?

officer she told me she was 4 billion years old

This galaxy in particular must be one of the first galaxies ever formed. If galaxies are more mature than initially thought, what does this imply about our previous models and imply about what might actually be happening?

There seems to be a large region of the universe, beyond furthest edges of the observable, but "in front of" the CMB, that is already outside of our past light cone due to expansion of the universe.

To add, Earth is only ~4.5 billion years old, the universe is 13.7 and possibly double that, so earth is only 1/3 the age of the universe. It took a lot of big stars going supernova to pollute the galaxy with enough dirt to make rocky planets, and in all that meantime, everything has been flying apart, with a significant chunk of it already so far away and expanding away even faster, there is measurable difference between the observable universe and the "whole universe."

I don't know if there was just a crap ton of blue hypergiant stars in the early universe that crank through the fusion ladder in a couple million years, it wouldn't surprise me.

There are the chemistry problems but the big one is "how did supermassive black holes get so big?" Webb is finding what seem to be huge black holes way back but the black hole problem has been around for at least 25 years if not more.

Supernovae can create black holes in the 10's of solar mass range and they can merge but it would take a long time for those to find each other to merge to the 60 billion solar mass range. You might have processes that make 10^5 solar mass black holes but it would still take a lot of time for those to find each other and merge to make supermassive black holes.

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