Rosa Rubicondior: The Universe Is Nothing Like The Description of it in The Bible 4

Figure 1. Image stamps of example very bright dropouts in F090W, F115W, F150W, and F200W, arranged from top to bottom. Two example objects are shown for each group. The stamps are 2″×2″ in size and are oriented with north being up and east being left. The images are from the HST ACS, JWST NIRCam, and JWST MIRI, with the passbands as noted. Most of the very bright dropouts are either disk-like (∼40%) or compact (∼45%) in morphology in F356W, and one each is shown for the F090W, F150W and F200W dropouts. The example F115W dropouts include a disk-like object and an irregular object. Only ∼15% of the very bright dropouts have irregular morphologies. The color stamps in the last column are constructed based on the NIRCam images, using F090W + F115W + F150W as blue, F200W + F277W as green, and F356W + F410M + F444W as red.

Sun, Bangzheng & Yan, Haojing (2025).(CC BY 4.0)

Early galaxies — or something else? Mizzou scientists uncover mysterious objects in the universe

In this fourth article in the series contrasting the real universe with the one described in the Bible, I look at the announcement that two cosmologists from the University of Missouri have discovered about 300 objects that are brighter than they should be if they are what researchers think they are – some of the first galaxies in the early universe. If that's what they turn out to be, it will require a reassessment of what cosmologists thought they knew about the formation of galaxies.

This highlights a frequently repeated contradiction in creationist claims: on the one hand, they insist scientists are only allowed to publish papers that conform to existing consensus, so "creationist science" never gets published; on the other hand, they complain that scientists keep changing their minds and rewriting the science books, unlike the Bible which never changes. They claim this means science is unreliable and not to be trusted. Obviously, both can't be right, but that doesn't stop creationists from claiming both simultaneously.

The other problem this paper highlights is the sheer scale of the universe and the timeline involved, which make the Bible's account look laughably naïve, even childish in its simplicity.

These mystery objects, discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope, are in the order of 13–14 billion light-years in look-back time, meaning we are seeing the light that left them when the universe was only a few hundred million years old. Because the universe has been expanding ever since, their actual present-day distance is much greater — probably 25–30 billion light-years away.

This doesn’t contradict the 13.8-billion-year age of the universe: the light has only been travelling for 13 billion years, but in that time the fabric of space itself has stretched. It’s a bit like two ants on a rubber band: one ant flashes a signal when it is 13 cm away, but by the time the other ant sees it, the band has stretched so much that they are now 30 cm apart. The signal only travelled 13 cm, but the current separation is larger because of the stretching. To suggest, as creationists must, that the well-established methods of cosmological distance measurement are so wrong that they confuse a universe a few thousand years old with one tens of billions of light-years across, is to cling to absurdity.

In fact, this paper shows science at its best. The researchers are effectively saying to their colleagues: “Look, we may have found a fundamental problem that could mean we were wrong all along. Let’s investigate further and be prepared to change our minds if the evidence demands it.” Now imagine a creationist announcing that they had discovered a contradiction in the Bible that forced them to question its divine authorship, or a Discovery Institute fellow admitting to evidence that could only be explained by Darwinian evolution. Such an admission would simply never happen — and certainly never be published in a creationist outlet.

Science is reasonable uncertainty; religion is unreasonable certainty.

How Do Cosmologists Measure Distance in the Universe? Measuring the distance to faraway galaxies isn’t like pacing out a field with a tape measure. Astronomers rely on light and its interaction with an expanding universe:

Redshift

As light travels through expanding space, its wavelength is stretched, making it appear redder than when it was emitted.
The greater the redshift, the faster the object is receding, and the further back in time we are seeing it.

Look-back Time vs. Proper Distance

Look-back time tells us how long the light has been travelling. If we see a galaxy at a look-back time of 13 billion years, its light set out 13 billion years ago.
Proper distance describes how far away that galaxy is today. Because space has expanded while the light was in transit, the galaxy is now much farther away — often tens of billions of light-years.

Dropout Technique

For very distant galaxies, astronomers use the "dropout" or Lyman-break method: the object appears only in certain infrared filters and disappears in others, a sign that its light has been shifted far to the red.

Analogy: Imagine two ants on a stretchy rubber band. One ant flashes a signal when it’s 13 cm away. By the time the other ant sees it, the band has stretched so that they are now 30 cm apart. The signal only travelled 13 cm, but the present-day separation is larger.

This combination of redshift measurements and cosmological models lets astronomers pin down distances with remarkable precision — certainly precise enough to distinguish between a universe billions of years old and one only a few thousand.

The paper in question was published last June in The Astrophysical Journal and is explained in lay terms in a University of Missouri news release.

Early galaxies — or something else? Mizzou scientists uncover mysterious objects in the universe
Using data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, University of Missouri researchers identified 300 unusual early galaxy candidates.
In a new study, scientists at the University of Missouri looked deep into the universe and found something unexpected. Using infrared images taken from NASA’s powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), they identified 300 objects that were brighter than they should be.

These mysterious objects are candidate galaxies in the early universe, meaning they could be very early galaxies. If even a few of these objects turn out to be what we think they are, our discovery could challenge current ideas about how galaxies formed in the early universe — the period when the first stars and galaxies began to take shape.

Professor Haojing Yan, co-author
Department of Physics and Astronomy
University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA.

But identifying objects in space doesn’t happen in an instant. It takes a careful step-by-step process to confirm their nature, combining advanced technology, detailed analysis and a bit of cosmic detective work.

Step 1: Spotting the first clues

Mizzou’s researchers started by using two of JWST’s powerful infrared cameras: the Near-Infrared Camera and the Mid-Infrared Instrument. Both are specifically designed to detect light from the most distant places in space, which is key when studying the early universe.

Why infrared? Because the farther away an object is, the longer its light has been traveling to reach us.

As the light from these early galaxies travels through space, it stretches into longer wavelengths — shifting from visible light into infrared. This stretching is called redshift, and it helps us figure out how far away these galaxies are. The higher the redshift, the farther away the galaxy is from us on Earth, and the closer it is to the beginning of the universe.

Professor Haojing Yan.

Step 2: The ‘dropout’

To identify each of the 300 early galaxy candidates, Mizzou’s researchers used an established method called the dropout technique.

It detects high-redshift galaxies by looking for objects that appear in redder wavelengths but vanish in bluer ones — a sign that their light has traveled across vast distances and time. This phenomenon is indicative of the ‘Lyman Break,’ a spectral feature caused by the absorption of ultraviolet light by neutral hydrogen. As redshift increases, this signature shifts to redder wavelengths.

Bangzheng “Tom” Sun, first-author.
Department of Physics and Astronomy
University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA.

Step 3: Estimating the details

While the dropout technique identifies each of the galaxy candidates, the next step is to check whether they could be at “very” high redshifts, Yan said.

Ideally this would be done using spectroscopy, a technique that spreads light across different wavelengths to identify signatures that would allow an accurate redshift determination

Professor Haojing Yan.

But when full spectroscopic data is unavailable, researchers can use a technique called spectral energy distribution fitting. This method gave Sun and Yan a baseline to estimate the redshifts of their galaxy candidates — along with other properties such as age and mass.

In the past, scientists often thought these extremely bright objects weren’t early galaxies, but something else that mimicked them. However, based on their findings, Sun and Yan believe these objects deserve a closer look — and shouldn’t be so quickly ruled out.

Even if only a few of these objects are confirmed to be in the early universe, they will force us to modify the existing theories of galaxy formation.

Professor Haojing Yan.

Step 4: The final answer

The final test will use spectroscopy — the gold standard — to confirm the team’s findings.

Spectroscopy breaks light into different wavelengths, like how a prism splits light into a rainbow of colors. Scientists use this technique to reveal a galaxy’s unique fingerprint, which can tell them how old the galaxy is, how it formed and what it’s made of.

One of our objects is already confirmed by spectroscopy to be an early galaxy. But this object alone is not enough. We will need to make additional confirmations to say for certain whether current theories are being challenged.

Bangzheng “Tom” Sun.

Publication:
Sun, Bangzheng & Yan, Haojing
On the Very Bright Dropouts Selected Using the James Webb Space Telescope NIRCam Instrument The Astrophysical Journal 987(1), 60 DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/addbe0.

Copyright: © 2025 The authors.
Published by OP Publishing. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

Abstract
The selection of candidate high-redshift galaxies using the dropout technique targeting the Lyman-break signature sometimes yields very bright objects that are too luminous to be easily explained if they are indeed at the expected redshifts. Here, we present systematic study of very bright dropouts selected through successive bands of the NIRCam instrument onboard the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Using the public NIRCam data in four blank fields over 500 arcmin2, 300 such objects were found. They have F356W magnitudes <25.1 mag or <26.0 mag depending on the dropout passband, and the majority of them (>80%) have very red F115W − F356W colors >2.0 mag, qualifying them as “extremely red objects.” We focus on 137 objects that also have mid-infrared observations from the JWST MIRI instrument. Their spectral energy distribution analysis shows that these objects are dominated by low-redshift (z ∼ 1–4) galaxies (≳67%). However, a non-negligible fraction (≳7%) could be at high redshifts. Seven of our objects have secure spectroscopic redshifts from JWST NIRSpec identifications, and the results confirm this picture: while six are low-redshift galaxies (z ≈ 3), one is a known galaxy at z = 8.679 (with \(\small M_\text{UV}\) = −22.4 mag and stellar mass \(\small M_* = 10^{9.1}M_\odot\) recovered in our sample. In light of recent theoretical models on early galaxy formation, this confirmed high-redshift galaxy does not pose a challenge. However, since our sample contains very luminous high-redshift candidates in the regime still underexplored (\(\small M_\text{UV} \le −23\ \text{mag}\) and \(\small M_* > 10^{10.5}M_\odot\)), spectroscopic identifications are necessary to ensure they do not create tension with these new models.

Sun, Bangzheng & Yan, Haojing
On the Very Bright Dropouts Selected Using the James Webb Space Telescope NIRCam Instrument The Astrophysical Journal 987(1), 60 DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/addbe0.

Copyright: © 2025 The authors.
Published by IOP Publishing. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

What this discovery once again underlines is how utterly detached the Bible’s account of creation is from the reality of the cosmos. The universe we observe is vast, ancient, and still full of surprises—and these new findings demand that we challenge and revise our understanding. And yet creationists repeat that scientists are untrustworthy because they “keep changing their minds,” while simultaneously insisting that no research inconsistent with consensus can ever be published. Discoveries like this show that science does both: it investigates anomalies, publishes the evidence, and is willing to shift theories. It’s not a weakness—it’s the very strength of the scientific method.

As we’ve seen, the literalist insistence on biblical inerrancy forces adherents to deny not just the results of a single study but the trusted methods of every telescope, spectrometer, and physics model ever devised. This isn’t just blinkered; it’s intellectually indefensible in the face of overwhelming empirical evidence. Science advances by questioning, testing, and revising. In contrast, biblical literalism stalls — it demands clinging to outdated accounts no matter how many times reality smacks it in the face.

There’s one more instalment in this series. In the final post, I’ll explore a startling new discovery: carbon dioxide has been detected in unusually high concentrations around a young star’s planet-forming disk—virtually devoid of water — upending our models of how Earth-like planets emerge. Stay tuned—because once again, the cosmos refuses to play by ancient texts’ rules.

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