{"id":231093,"date":"2026-02-11T01:38:49","date_gmt":"2026-02-11T07:38:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/old-galaxies-in-a-young-universe"},"modified":"2026-02-11T01:38:49","modified_gmt":"2026-02-11T07:38:49","slug":"old-galaxies-in-a-young-universe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/old-galaxies-in-a-young-universe","title":{"rendered":"Old galaxies in a young universe?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/old-galaxies-in-a-young-universe.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The standard cosmological model (present-day version of \u201cBig Bang,\u201d called Lambda-CDM) gives an age of the universe close to 13.8 billion years and much younger when we explore the universe at high-redshift. The redshift of galaxies is produced by the expansion of the universe, which causes emitted wavelengths to lengthen and move toward the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum.<\/p>\n<p>The further away a galaxy is, the more rapidly it is moving with respect to us, and so the greater is its redshift; and, given that the speed of light is finite, the more we travel to the past. Hence, measuring the age of very high redshift galaxies would be a way to test the cosmological model. Galaxies cannot be older than the age of the universe in which they are; it would be absurd, like a son older than his mother.<\/p>\n<p>In work carried out with my colleague, Carlos M. Guti\u00e9rrez, at the Canary Islands Astrophysics Institute (IAC; Spain), we analyzed 31 galaxies with average redshift 7.3 (when the universe was 700 Myr old, according to the standard model) observed with the most powerful available telescope available: the <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2022-11-farthest-galaxy-candidate-james-webb.html?utm_source=embeddings&utm_medium=related&utm_campaign=internal\" rel=\"related\">James Webb Space Telescope<\/a> (JWST).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The standard cosmological model (present-day version of \u201cBig Bang,\u201d called Lambda-CDM) gives an age of the universe close to 13.8 billion years and much younger when we explore the universe at high-redshift. The redshift of galaxies is produced by the expansion of the universe, which causes emitted wavelengths to lengthen and move toward the red [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-231093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231093"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231093\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}