Nature: A team led by Richard Ellis of Caltech examined seven galaxies, each of which formed less than 600 million years after the Big Bang. One of the galaxies, which the researchers measured to be 13.29 billion light-years away from Earth, set a new record for oldest known galaxy. For their study, Ellis and colleagues used the Hubble Space Telescope‘s Wide Field Camera 3, combined with earlier studies of the area known as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. They used exposure times twice as long as any that the camera had previously recorded and a filter that helped them eliminate closer light sources. Another team had determined the redshift of the record-setting galaxy to be 10, dating it to 482 million years after the Big Bang. But Ellis’s team remeasured the redshift to a value of 11.9, which would make the galaxy much older. Both teams of researchers warn, however, that the calculated ages are greater than expected for the formation of large galaxies and the discrepancy still isn’t understood.
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Forming a star in 380 million years seems reasonable, but starting from a chaotic soup of subatomic particles and forming an entire fundamental object like a galaxy in 380 million years seems to strain credibility to the limit.
I think we are seeing the demise of the concept that the entire Universe, including space-time geometry, was “created” in a Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.
Far more likely, given the observations, is that there was a Little Bang 13.7 billion years ago, and the Little Bang was the explosion of a vast metagalactic object in analogy to a stellar scale supernova. The metagalactic object would be just one of countless others on a scale we can hardly imagine.
Just as in the case of a supernova wherein subatomic particles existed before the supernova, so also would galaxies pre-exist the 13.7 billion year-old explosion of the metagalaxy.
We have waited decades for an infinite fractal cosmological paradigm to be given a fair chance. Perhaps we are on the threshold of a major paradigm-change in cosmology.
Robert L. Oldershaw
Discrete Scale Relativity
http://www3.amherst.edu/~rloldershaw
Maybe the universe is older than currently thought.
This paper deduces an older age.
Dynamical 3-Space: Supernovae and the Hubble Expansion – Older Universe and End of Dark Energy
http://arxiv.org/abs/0705.1569