New Delhi

To return to past, one might need a Time Machine, and that as of now, is the subject of science fiction. But scientists have now managed to find out something from the depth of time for real. They have discovered something 'really surprising' from billions of years ago that could change the way we understand the grand infinite universe. 

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The findings came from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and the Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam) deployed on it. The technology allows scientists to study the earliest known galaxies in our universe. 

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A team of researchers from Durham University have dissected data from just a few billion years after the universe was formed. For reference, our universe is about 13.7 billion years old.

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This is even further back than the previous earliest-known conditions of universe observed for the period about nine billion years ago. 

The team’s findings have been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

What does it mean?

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The findings point to the presence of more settled forms of environments. They occurred despite the more chaotic nature of galaxies in their earlier gestation period.

"Galaxies in the early universe are maturing much faster than we thought," said Zoe Le Conte, a PhD researcher in the Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy within the Department of Physics at Durham University, who is also the lead author on the research.

"This is a real surprise because you would expect the universe at that stage to be very turbulent with lots of collisions between galaxies and a lot of gas that hasn’t yet transformed into stars."

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"However, thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope we are seeing a lot of these bars much earlier in the life of the Universe which means that galaxies were at a more settled stage in their evolution than previously thought."

"This means we will have to adjust our views on early galaxy evolution."

(With inputs from agencies)