Astronomers Stunned As Webb Spots Sleeping Beauty Galaxies Where They Shouldn't Exist

James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has found a dozen dormant (or affectionately called “sleeping beauty”) galaxies, which are ancient galaxies that have mysteriously stopped forming stars. The surprise isn't just that they’re dormant, but that they were napping amidst the universe's infancy, an era previously thought to be an energetic, unceasing star-forming factory. Such a finding challenges our core understanding of how galaxies evolved in the first billion years following the Big Bang.

Astronomers have long operated under the assumption that the early universe was a period of frantic activity. Galaxies in this era were believed to be voracious star-forming machines, constantly fueled by vast clouds of cold gas. For crying out loud, even existing cosmological models predicted a steady, continuous stream of star birth, with galaxies only settling down into a quieter, more mature state much later on. Therefore, the surprise discovery of these quiescent, or sleeping, galaxies is like finding a group of teenagers asleep at a rave—it just doesn't fit the picture.

In a recent research by an international group of researchers, the team used JWST's infrared capabilities to peer back to a time when the universe was just a fraction of its current age. By analyzing the light from these distant systems, they determined that these galaxies had a population of old, red stars but showed no signs of new, blue stars being born. This distinct lack of star formation, a state known as quiescence, was previously only expected in much more massive and mature galaxies.