Back in the Bronze Age — a period Christopher Hitchens once described as "the fearful infancy of our species" — people gazed up at the sky and imagined a dome over a small, flat Earth. In the absence of scientific knowledge, they filled the gaps in their understanding with stories that reflected their assumptions about how the world worked: a small, teleological world governed by invisible agents or spirits who made things happen. These stories were eventually written down in ancient texts and, over time, compiled into a book that was later declared to be the holy word of an omnipotent, omniscient god.
One such story recounts how this god spoke magic words that caused the entire universe — including that small, flat planet with a dome overhead — to spring forth out of nothing just a few thousand years ago. This same god then populated the Earth with a handful of species and two fully formed humans, all without ancestry, who supposedly gave rise to the entire diversity of life and the global human population within the last 6,000 to 10,000 years.
Curiously, despite how wildly this tale diverges from what we now know about the formation of the universe and the evolutionary history of life on Earth — from a common ancestor through divergence and speciation — some people continue to insist that the version crafted by scientifically illiterate Bronze Age storytellers is correct, and that the evidence painstakingly uncovered by generations of scientists must somehow be mistaken, or even the false claims of sinister conspirators.
They dismiss even the most robust, verifiable evidence — such as recent findings on the formation of galaxies like the Milky Way, home to our own planet, which formed roughly 3–4 billion years after the Big Bang. That event, the beginning of space and time, is thought to have arisen from a quantum fluctuation in a non-zero energy field.
This evidence of how galaxies formed in the 'Cosmic Noon' was recently published in an open-access paper in Astrophysical Journal Letters, authored by a team of astrophysicists led by Professor Eric Gawiser of Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA.
What is currently known of the formation of galaxies in the early universe and how does this research add to that knowledge? Formation of Galaxies in the Early UniverseThe team explained their research in a Rutgers University news release:
Current Understanding:
Galaxies are thought to have formed from the gravitational collapse of matter in the early universe, following the Big Bang around 13.8 billion years ago. Roughly 300–400 million years after the Big Bang, the first stars ignited in what are called protogalaxies — small, early clumps of gas and dark matter. These protogalaxies merged and evolved into larger, more structured galaxies over time. Key drivers of galaxy formation include:
- Dark matter, which provided the gravitational scaffolding.
- Gas cooling and star formation, which shaped galactic structure.
- Galaxy mergers, which built larger galaxies from smaller ones.
- Feedback from stars and black holes, which regulated star formation.
What the New Research Shows:
A study published in Astrophysical Journal Letters (2024) by Professor Eric Gawiser and colleagues used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to peer back over 12 billion years into the universe's past. They detected bursts of star formation in early galaxies — evidence of rapid and dynamic growth much earlier than previously documented.
This research reveals that:
- Star formation in the early universe was not smooth and gradual, but episodic, with short, intense bursts.
- Galaxies were building their stellar populations in faster and more chaotic cycles than models had suggested.
- JWST’s resolution allows us to observe galaxies as they appeared just 700–800 million years after the Big Bang, offering direct insight into formative processes in the universe’s infancy.
These findings refine our models of early galaxy evolution and help explain how present-day galaxies, like the Milky Way, assembled over billions of years.
Prodigious star formation by special galaxies reveals the Milky Way’s origin story
Researchers led by a Rutgers University-New Brunswick astrophysicist, who looked deeply into space at a period known as “Cosmic Noon” about 2 billion to 3 billion years after the Big Bang, have found that a special class of galaxies were busy experiencing their first major burst of star formation.
The discovery is important, scientists said, because it will answer questions about how galaxies grow and evolve, providing key insights into the early stages of galaxy development and the overall history of the universe.
Reporting their findings in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the team described crucial details uncovered about the star formation histories of ancient galaxies known as Lyman Alpha Emitters, or LAEs. To perform the study, scientists leveraged sophisticated imaging and machine learning techniques to look at Cosmic Noon, a period in the universe's history believed to be a peak era for galaxy development.
LAEs are galaxies that shine brightly because they are actively forming new stars. Ultraviolet light called “Lyman Alpha” is transformed into visible light as the universe expands, making these galaxies observable from Earth. LAEs are incredibly ancient, dating back more than 12 billion years, acting as cosmic beacons that help scientists understand the early universe.
LAEs have been identified as progenitors of typical present-day galaxies like our own Milky Way. Now that we know when they first formed their stars, we have discovered our own galaxy’s ‘origin story,’ unlocking one of the mysteries of creation.
Nicole Firestone, first author.
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, Piscataway, NJ, USA.
The original motivation for studying the ancient galaxies was to understand what the Milky Way galaxy looked like when it first started forming stars. Earlier research by Eric Gawiser, a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, showed that LAEs will grow and evolve until they resemble the present-day Milky Way.
Until now, it remained an open question whether we had looked far enough back in time to find the starting points for the Milky Way and galaxies like it. Now we know the answer to that question is ‘Yes!’
Professor Eric Gawiser, senior author
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, Piscataway, NJ, USA.
Scientists have long wondered whether LAEs are galaxies experiencing their first burst of star formation or if they are older galaxies that have resumed star formation after a period of inactivity. This distinction is crucial for understanding the evolution of galaxies over cosmic time, the researchers said.
For the very first time, we have been able to definitively show that most LAEs are experiencing their first major starburst at the time of observation and only have very young stars.
Nicole Firestone.
They used data from the ODIN project, a sky survey with a name that is an acronym for “One-hundred-deg2 DECam Imaging in Narrowbands.” The project employs the Dark Energy Camera at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. This camera captures specialized images of the distant universe over a large area of the sky.
The team identified LAEs as objects that appear much brighter in these specialized images compared with the colors of light visible to the human eye.
For the analysis, the researchers used a machine-learning technique to analyze the light from these galaxies to infer their physical properties, including the rate of star formation as a function of time. This method allowed them to reconstruct a detailed “life story” for each LAE in their sample. The method used for this was developed at Rutgers by Gawiser and Kartheik Iyer, a former graduate student who worked with the professor.
The study revealed that 95% of LAEs are at their peak star-forming phase. This result confirms that LAEs are in a crucial early stage of development, helping scientists understand the timeline and processes involved in galaxy formation, Firestone said.
The data are a stepping stone in revealing the precise conditions under which galaxies experience significant starbursts.
This discovery helps us understand what our own Milky Way galaxy looked like when it first started forming stars.
Professor Eric Gawiser.
Publication:
AbstractCreationists insist that the Bible must be correct, and science must be wrong because, they claim, it was written or inspired by the creator god it describes—an assertion for which there is not a shred of definitive evidence. This claim relies entirely on circular reasoning: the Bible must be true because the Bible says it is true. The intellectual dishonesty required to present such transparently fallacious logic as a compelling argument is nothing short of astonishing.
In this work, we test the frequent assumption that Lyα-emitting galaxies (LAEs) are experiencing their first major burst of star formation at the time of observation. To this end, we identify 74 LAEs from the ODIN Survey with rest-UV-through-NIR photometry from UVCANDELS. For each LAE, we perform nonparametric star formation history (SFH) reconstruction using the Dense Basis Gaussian-process-based method of spectral energy distribution fitting. We find that a strong majority (67%) of our LAE SFHs align with the frequently assumed archetype of a first major star formation burst, with at most modest star formation rates (SFRs) in the past. However, the rest of our LAE SFHs have significant amounts of star formation in the past, with 28% exhibiting earlier bursts of star formation, with the ongoing burst having the highest SFR (dominant bursts) and the final 5% having experienced their highest SFR in the past (nondominant bursts). Combining the SFHs indicating first and dominant bursts, ∼95% of LAEs are experiencing their largest burst yet: a formative burst. We also find that the fraction of total stellar mass created in the last 200 Myr is ∼1.3 times higher in LAEs than in mass-matched Lyman break galaxy (LBG) samples, and that a majority of LBGs are experiencing dominant bursts, reaffirming that LAEs differ from other star-forming galaxies. Overall, our results suggest that multiple evolutionary paths can produce galaxies with strong observed Lyα emission.
Nicole M. Firestone et al 2025 ODIN: Star Formation Histories Reveal Formative Starbursts Experienced by Lyα-emitting Galaxies at Cosmic Noon
ApJL 986 L8 DOI 10.3847/2041-8213/adbf8c
Copyright: © 2025 The authors.
Published by IOP Publishing. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
The most plausible explanation for the unbridgeable chasm between the description of the universe in the Bible and what science is steadily revealing is that the biblical creation stories were simply the best guesses of ancient people. These stories reflected their cultural assumptions and were crafted to offer satisfying and plausible answers based on their limited knowledge and understanding of the world around them. This is the inescapable conclusion reached through any objective comparison between those early myths and the evidence-based reality that science continues to uncover.
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