How galactic mysteries near and far are poised to shake up cosmology

THERE were some exciting goings-on in astrophysics last year. The one that probably got the most attention was the question of whether NASA’s latest flagship observatory, aka JWST or what I like to call the Just Wonderful Space Telescope, had upended what we know about the timeline of galaxy formation. The hints that there might be a problem with our understanding of how galaxies take shape came almost as soon as JWST started returning data. In 2022, the world watched as astronomers learned that galaxies seemed to form earlier, or at least faster, than expected in the early universe.

The…