James Webb Space Telescope | Extremely High Redshift Failure
The James Webb Space TelescopeThe James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is an exquisitely designed and constructed telescope now orbiting in space some 1.5 million kilometers from Earth around a stationary point called Lagrange point L2, co-orbiting the Sun with the Earth. It is pointed away from the Sun so that its sensitive mirrors are not damaged by the solar wind and the intense radiation. The JWST was designed to “see” at very long wavelengths past red down into the infra-red.
Because of this design, and its location in the vacuum of space, it was expected to see more red-ward than any other human made telescope. So when it started to see hundreds of Little Red Dots, assume galaxies, with very large redshifts, suggesting they were the most distant galaxies ever observed, it was hailed a success.
But a problem occurred. The apparent luminosity and redshifts of those objects meant that if they are galaxies they are too mature (or massive in size) to exist so soon after the alleged big bang, that is only 500-700 million years after the beginning of time.
From the observed luminosity and redshift the cosmologist cranks the handle, using the assumed cosmological model, and calculates their absolute luminosity, which means the effect of the alleged expansion of the universe is corrected for. The resulting absolute luminosity (or magnitude) means they must be massively large.
This discovery challenged the standard belief that galaxies began as smaller entities evolving over time as they accumulated mass, meaning accumulating more stars and shining brighter.
According to the standard theory they exist too soon, that is, too early, for them to evolve into such massive galaxies. This means the big bang galaxy formation story is unraveling. Read the following.
In 2024 the JWST spectroscopically measured the redshift of an alleged galaxy with z = 14. That made it the farthest known galaxy and placed it at about 290 million years after the big bang. The gold standard redshift measurement is using the source’s spectrum, therefore spectroscopic as compared to photometric or drop-out method.
But now a new problem. A new object, CEERS-U-100588, provisionally named “Capotauro”, was observed with a photometric redshift of z = 32, far greater that any previously measured.
[Capotauro] is characterized by a significant absence of light in certain wavelengths and a pronounced drop in others. Its paucity of light and spectral peculiarities make it an enigmatic object, defying conventional classifications and sparking debate about whether the standard cosmological model might need adjustments,[2] although another study suggests otherwise for galaxies up to redshift z=30.[3]
According to standard big bang theory a galaxy with a redshift of about z = 32 puts it in a universe only about 90 million years after the beginning. But that is impossible, because calculations based on its apparent luminosity and redshift mean it must be ridiculously massive, if you believe the theoretical derived calculation of its absolute magnitude.
The object’s apparent luminosity implies a mass near a billion suns which is difficult to reconcile with current theories.
Watch this video below! But beware of the standard big bang cosmic evolutionary assumptions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKLzYWnoKYo
The commentator Anton Petrov said that such objects, meaning massive galaxies like this one, should not exist because they wouldn’t have had time to grow into such a massive size, as calculated from the apparent luminosity, redshift and the standard cosmological model. For this reason he said the object breaks the models.
In fact, as he explains it cannot be a galaxy at all, but is most probably a Brown Dwarf star in our Milky Way galaxy. That means it is not the most distant galaxy ever observed and it did not exist when the universe was only 90 million years old.
Part of the problem is that the astronomers assumed that because it was so red, indeed observed in the infra-red by the JWST, it must be due to the massive stretching of the light wavelengths from the source. But they didn’t get a spectrum. There was a paucity of light and they photometrically determined the redshift based on the assumed model and its colour. That is the drop out method he mentions, which has certain limitations.
However the detection of two other objects, BD1 and BD2, found in the Bullet cluster, was an eye opener. They allegedly had spectroscopic redshifts greater than z = 20, under the assumption that they are galaxies.
Then the astronomers waited and a year later measured the same objects. They found that they both moved on the night sky relative to where they were first observed. Of course this implies that their redshift determinations were erroneous and could not be due to cosmological expansion.
No object out on the edge of the visible universe could ever have proper motion. That would be impossible because they would be just too far away. They should appear as fixed background objects.
So these BD1 and BD2 objects with claimed very large redshifts must be in our galaxy, and that means their redshifts are not due to the Hubble expansion.
Petrov said “They just looked like distant galaxies”. But he does not mention the fact that some quasars, as recently as 2022, have also been discovered to have proper motion.
One study published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A 660, A16 (2022)) identified “a set of 41 quasars with a proper motion exceeding 10 mas/yr, which can be considered as very high for objects which are a priori fixed in the celestial sphere.”
Quasars are believed to be active galactic nuclei in the standard cosmology. Thus they could not be galaxies inside our Milky Way galaxy. Read The Heavens Declare a Different Story.
So BD1 and BD2 turned out to be cool Brown Dwarf stars, with surface temperatures of around 300 K and not so far away. They only emit infra-red light and were confused with extremely distant galaxies. This is because certain assumptions are made and filters applied. They had spectra for the Brown Dwarf stars but confused them with distant early universe galaxies. This fact calls into question the veracity even of spectroscopically measured redshifts.
An assumption Petrov speaks of is that the Brown Dwarfs must have existed for billions of years just so that they have had time to cool to their current temperature. This is a standard cosmic evolutionary assumption. I don’t accept that.
In regard to these Brown Dwarf stars Petrov asked “How did the professional astronomers get this so wrong?”
His first suggestion is the apparent similarity to the Lyman-α break in their spectra. According to standard cosmology once you have to look down in the far infra-red spectra due to the reddening of the light wavelengths you run out of spectral lines after the Lyman break. That is due to the physics of the hydrogen atom. But the astronomers must assume that that is what they are seeing and with the Brown Dwarfs they assumed the wrong thing. It so model dependent it could be anything.
Secondly both the BD’s and the expected Little Red Dot galaxies at the edge of time are tiny red dots in images, so are very similar. And the third cause of misinterpretation is dust. Dust in the foreground filters out the shorter wavelengths leaving red images. The BD’s are naturally red due to their surface temperature. They are brown after all.
Thus there may be many BD’s in our galaxy which have been misidentified as early universe distant galaxies.
What more can one say? Many objects in the Milky Way galaxy may have been misidentified as distant galaxies in the alleged early universe. The reason this has happened is the result of the worldview of the astronomers takes precedent over everything else. The observations are always interpreted in light of big bang evolutionary cosmology.
But cosmology is not real science! At best it is a forensic search for what is already believed to be true, that the universe created itself some 14 billion years ago out of nothing. It is a faith position, which fails to make any sense.
Comment by a physicist friend
Although it is possible that we are looking at a brown dwarf rather than a galaxy, I am not convinced either way.
Spectroscopic redshifts are known to be inaccurate; without sharp emission/absorption lines there is no way to establish the correct redshift. The new paper discussed by A. Petrov uses the NIRSpec PRISM spectrometer on JWST, but no obvious sharp line is seen in the noise. They compare the observed spectrum with a dwarf model and with a galaxy model. But the galaxy model is not designed to work beyond z = 10, and it assumes space-expansion redshift which yields brighter galaxies than the actual brightness of the observed galaxies. So the models are off, which may explain why the fit to ‘a galaxy’ is not as good as a fit to a ‘brown dwarf’.
As for the proper motion, it is at the limit of JWST’s resolution. It is strange that the proper motion of the two brown dwarfs discovered in the same area of the sky move in the same direction and by the same amount! I suspect that JWST used a guide star that was not accurately centered on the tracking system, giving the entire frame an apparent proper motion that differs from the GAIA measurements. Unfortunately the paper only looks at the proper motion of the two galaxies (or brown dwarfs), I suspect every other object would appear to have moved in the same direction.
I would say “JWST galaxy redshift = 32 uncertain.” From the spectrum, the Lyman break is more likely at z = 38, but without a sharp line it’s impossible to say. Also, at such a large distance (48 Gly!) inhomogeneities in the electron density start to distort the image and the spectrum.
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Changing-Look Quasars
Figure 1a: The quasar 3C 273, which resides in a giant elliptical galaxy in the constellation of Virgo. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASAHow do they fit into a biblical creationist model?
Quasars are very high redshift astronomical objects with broad emission line (BEL) spectra. The latter is very different to that in the usual humdrum galaxies. This means the objects redshifts and BEL spectra can be used to identify them. And because of their high redshifts they are assumed to be very distant, very luminous active galaxies with super-massive black holes at their hearts, powering them to emit prodigious amounts of radiation over all wave-bands of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Figure 1b: Spectra of quasar 3C 273 compared to the star Vega. Spectral lines are shifted towards the red end of the spectrum, from which its distance is determined using the standard LCDM cosmology.Most of the high redshift objects in the universe are quasars. The redshifts of galaxies and quasars when interpreted within big bang cosmology—the greater the redshift the greater the distance—means that the most distant objects are seen at a time when the Universe was youngest.1
Following big bang thinking, quasars are then considered to be just galaxies in some early stage of development—back closer in time to the big bang—than the usual spiral and elliptical galaxies we might see with much lower redshifts. The quasar 3C 273, shown in Fig. 1a, the first to be identified (discovered in the early 1960s by astronomer Allan Sandage), has been shown to reside in a giant elliptical galaxy in the constellation of Virgo. According to standard cosmology its redshift puts it at a distance of 2.5 billion light-years from Earth.
Quasar to galaxy transitions
According to the big bang theory, how long should a quasar remain in the form of a quasar before transitioning into a normal galaxy and how long should that transition take? Quite obviously the answer to that question depends on one having a correct understanding of what quasars actually are and an accurate model describing their evolution. It would be no underestimate to state that an accurate model for galaxy formation, let alone a transition from a quasar to a normal field galaxy, is far from being known. The formation of a galaxy alone requires the invoking of a very large dark matter content, and often ‘jumping over’ the important details of star formation just to obtain something that looks like a galaxy. This means that there are physical laws in this Universe that create barriers in computer simulations preventing the formation of stars and hence galaxies. It is these that must be ‘jumped over’ in order that the simulations may proceed.2
We can assume that quasars have masses comparable to that of most galaxies. From that is follows then that naturalistic changes—that is, uniformitarian changes—can be expected to be of the order of a billion years.3 Without any real model for the changes expected in quasars, it may not be too unreasonable to expect any changes in their luminosity to be over uniformitarian timescales, and fuelled by growth of their supermassive black-holes, as some propose.
By contrast, according to the Genesis 1 narrative, God took one 24-hour day to create all astronomical objects, therefore we expect at creation that the youngest sources (which could include quasars) have very quickly changing observable features, such as luminosity. Yet very rapid changes, even down to timescales of days and weeks, in the observed luminosity of quasars have been recorded.4,5 One suggestion is that those variations are caused by microlensing6 and another is obscuration by dust but these mechansims are considered to be too long.7 Another is the rapid consumption of a passing star or gas and dust by the central supermassive black hole. Such proposals are offered because changes on such short timescales are not expected from the growth of the alleged supermassive black-holes at the heart of the quasars.
Changing-look quasars
Now we read in an online news report8 that astronomers think that they have detected a dozen quasars in a disappearing act—the so-called “changing-look quasars.” Or they have been caught transitioning into their quiescent and dimmer counterparts—galaxies with starving black holes at their cores. This fact has left astronomers asking whether these objects are shutting down permanently or simply flickering out for the time being.
Last year Stephanie LaMassa from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (then at Yale University) discovered the greatest change in luminosity ever detected in a quasar. She was digging through data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey when she found that a quasar had dimmed in brightness by a factor of six in just 10 years. Its spectrum changed, too, from that of a classic quasar to a regular galaxy.8 (my emphasis added)
Figure 2: The image shows an artist’s conception of the ‘changing-look quasar’ as is appeared in early 2015. The glowing blue region shows the last of the gas being swallowed by the central black hole as it shuts off. The spectrum is the previous one obtained by the SDSS in 2003. Credit: Dana Berry / SkyWorks Digital, Inc.; SDSS collaboration.Because astronomers believe in the very long time scale big bang paradigm they are forced to suggest any rapid dimming in the luminosity of any quasar must be either a transient effect or the very rare chance of observing the fuel exhausted from a supermassive black hole. One report states that,
“Astronomers can’t find any sign of the black hole at the center of the quasar SDSS J1011+5442, and they couldn’t be happier.”9
In the case of this quasar (see Fig. 2) it is alleged that,
“… over the past ten years, it appears to have swallowed all the gas in its vicinity. With the gas fallen into the black hole, astronomers from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) were unable to detect the spectroscopic signature of the quasar, which now appears as an otherwise normal galaxy.”9 (my emphasis added)
The dimming was very significant and now appears like a normal humdrum galaxy.
“The difference was stunning and unprecedented,” said John Ruan of the University of Washington, lead author of a related paper ….. “The hydrogen-alpha emission dropped by a factor of 50 in less than twelve years, and the quasar now looks like a normal galaxy.” The change was so great that throughout the SDSS collaboration and astronomy community, the quasar became known as a “changing-look quasar.”9 (my emphasis added)
However, one of the newly discovered rapidly dimming quasar did re-brighten.
“And one of the 12 newly discovered objects did not just disappear but reappear. Krolik thinks that this lonely quasar blazed back into existence for the same reason that it flickered out: a variation in the gas and dust flowing onto the black hole.”8 (my emphasis added)
Certainly it is possible that the standard interpretation for quasars as AGNs10 powered by a supermassive black-hole is one possible explanation. The next step then will be to see if any of the other newly discovered dozen or so quasars re-brighten over the coming years.
A different explanation
A different explanation is one consistent with the work of the late Halton Arp11 where he suggested that quasars are born from the hearts of active parent galaxies. Over time, which he had no measure of, the ejected quasars transitioned from active highly luminous high redshift objects with BEL line spectra to the usual field galaxies with much lower redshifts and typical spectra. This is illustrated in Fig. 3. Quasars are ejected in opposite directions from the nucleus of an active galaxy and over time they change their internal state including redshift, which decreases with finite discrete steps towards the commonly observed low redshift in field galaxies. Thus quasars and active galactic nuclei become normal galaxies.
Figure 3: Arp’s model of ejection of quasars from active parent galaxies and their eventual change to normal galaxies. Reproduced from Ref. 11 after Arp’s original in his book “Seeing Red.”Apparently the idea that quasars or active galactic nuclei could become inactive is not controversial in the big bang universe. But the expected timescale is not less than tens of thousands of years. What LaMassa and her colleagues doubted was that a quasar could go from active to inactive in just 10 years. But this is what these newly discovered rapidly dimming quasars have established. Rapid changes in the emission properties of the quasars, on timescales very much in line with a creation scenario, are observed. Even their spectra changing from that of a classic quasar to a regular galaxy.9
A biblical creation explanation
So this discovery is consistent with a creation scenario where we expect that processes in astronomical sources to be well less than seven thousand years. In the case of a creation process of galaxies formed from AGNs—the parent galaxies—and the ejected galaxies in the form of quasars, it would be essential that the quasars (at least some of them) have changed to normal humdrum galaxies in a period less than the time since Creation, that is less than about six thousand years.
However, it is also expected that many galaxies were created in their current forms, but if Arp’s evidence for quasars and active galactic nuclei transitioning to normal galaxies is correct, then this is what would be expected in the biblical creation model. Here we have an opportunity to see if these rapidly dimmed quasars, remain dim or re-brighten. Time will tell.
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Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 23/05/2026
It’s Saturday once again, so time for another update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further six papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 110 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 558.
I will continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience); these announcements also show the DOI for each paper.
The first paper to report this week, published on Monday 18th May in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics is “Edges In Coadded Images” by Erin Sheldon (Brookhaven National Laboratory, USA). This paper describes a study exploring how image discontinuities and noise impact weak gravitational lensing measurements, finding no significant biases under typical conditions. Biases occur only in extreme cases, but can be mitigated.
The overlay for this paper is here
You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:
https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116594222032390191
The second paper for this week, also published on Monday 18th May but in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics, is “Joint cosmological fits to DESI-DR1 full-shape clustering and weak gravitational lensing in configuration space” by A. Semenaite (Swinburne Institute of Technology, Australia) and 72 other authors from all round the world. This paper presents a cosmological analysis of correlations between the DESI-DR1 Bright Galaxy Survey and Luminous Red Galaxy samples and overlapping shear measurements from various weak lensing surveys.
The overlay for this one is here:
The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:
https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116594256215421009
Next one up, the third paper of the week, and the third published on Monday 18th May, and in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics is “Probing Dark Energy Microphysics with kSZ Tomography” by Julius Adolff, Selim Hotinli and Neal Dalal (all of the Perimeter Institute, Canada). This paper explores how kinetic Sunyaev-Zel’dovich tomography and galaxy clustering can enhance our understanding of dark energy and its effects, potentially revealing its microphysical properties in future surveys.
The overlay for this one is here:
The final, accepted version can be found on arXiv here and the Mastodon announcement is here:
https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116594304124291605
The fourth paper this week, published on Wednesday May 20th is “A Census of Variable Radio Sources at 3 GHz” by Yjan A. Gordon, Peter S. Ferguson, Michael N. Martinez and Eric J. Hooper (all of the University of Wisconsin, USA). This article, published in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, uses data from the Very Large Array Sky Survey to analyze variability in the radio sky, finding most changes consistent with blazars and quasars.
The overlay is here:
The officially accepted version can be found on arXiv here and here is the Mastodon announcement:
https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116607468481260244
The fifth article of this week was published on Friday 22nd May in the folder Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics. The title is “Uncovering the Next Galactic Supernova with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory” by John Banovetz (Lawrence Berkeley Lab., USA), Claire-Alice Hebert & Peter B. Denton (Brookhaven National Lab., USA), Dan Scolnic (Duke University, USA), Anze Slosar (Brookhaven) and Chris Walter (Duke). The paper presents a study simulating how effectively the Vera C. Rubin Observatory can localize supernovae using neutrino triggers, finding a 57-97% success rate based on stellar mass density predictions.
The overlay is here:
You can find the authorized version of this paper on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement is here:
https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116617293753093751
Last, but by no means least, this week we have “Pulsar timing solutions for 17 pulsars at 150 MHz from the Irish LOFAR station” by David J. McKenna (ASTRON, The Netherlands), Evan F. Keane (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland), Peter T. Gallagher (DIAS, Ireland) and Joe McCauley (Trinity). This was published on Friday 22nd May in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. It presents a demonstration of the use of international Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) stations in tracking and characterizing pulsars, providing new insights into these neutron stars’ emission properties.
The overlay for this one is here:
You can find the authorized version of this paper on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement is here:
https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116617404344791486
And that concludes this week’s update. I’ll do another one next Saturday.
#arXiv250800976v2 #arXiv250906929v3 #arXiv251105653v2 #arXiv251215961v2 #arXiv260112094v2 #arXiv260522516v1 #AstrophysicsOfGalaxies #blazars #cosmicShear #cosmologicalSimulations #CosmologyAndNonGalacticAstrophysics #DarkEnergy #DarkEnergySpectroscopicInstrument #DarkEnergySurvey #DiamondOpenAccess #DiamondOpenAccessPublishing #galaxyClustering #HighEnergyAstrophysicalPhenomena #InstrumentationAndMethodsForAstrophysics #kineticSunyaevZeDovichEffect #LOFAR #OpenAccess #OpenAccessPublishing #PointSpreadFunction #pulsars #quasars #radioAstronomy #stackedImages #SunyaevZeDovichEffect #supernova #supernovae #Tomography #VeraCRubinObservatory #VeryLargeArray #weakGravitationalLensing
The existence of abundant post-starburst/quiescent galaxies just $\sim$1-2 Gyrs after the Big Bang challenges our current paradigm of galaxy evolution. Cosmological simulations suggest that quasar feedback is likely the most promising mechanism responsible for such rapid quenching. Here we report a high detection rate (6/27) of exceptionally fast and powerful galaxy-scale outflows traced by [O III] emission in z $\sim$ 5-6 luminous quasars as revealed by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), with velocity up to $\sim$8400 km s$^{-1}$ and order-of-magnitude kinetic energy outflow rates up to $\sim$260% the observed quasar bolometric luminosities. This fraction is $>$3.9 and $\sim$8.8 times of those in comparison samples at z $\sim$ 1.5-3.5 and z $<$ 1, respectively. These extreme outflows are comparable to or even faster than the most rapid [O III] outflows reported at z $\lesssim$ 3, and could reach the circumgalactic medium (CGM) or even the intergalactic medium (IGM). The average kinetic energy outflow rate of our sample is more than 2 dex higher than those of the lower-redshift comparison samples. The substantially higher frequency of outflows with energetics well above the threshold for negative feedback in our sample strongly suggests that quasar feedback plays a significant role in efficiently quenching/regulating early massive galaxies.
Here's a new paper led by #UCIrvine graduate student Raymond Remigio. These are the first results from a program using the new red channel of the Keck Cosmic Web Imager to search for extended Lyman-alpha haloes around high-redshift quasars.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ae67ed
Detection of an Extended Lyα Halo around a z = 6.64 Broad Absorption Line Quasar with the Keck Cosmic Web Imager, Remigio, Raymond P., Barth, Aaron J., Wang, Feige, Yang, Jinyi, Hennawi, Joseph F., Cooke, Ryan J., Bañados, Eduardo, Fan, Xiaohui, Farina, Emanuele Paolo
German Virtual Observatory
Bible Science Forum
In the Dark
Daniel Fischer
Aaron Barth