Journey to Recently Discovered Galaxy That Shouldn’t Exist

**Sanitized Transcript:**

Red lights flash. The crew scatters across the hull of the space cruiser in a blind panic. All of their models, all of their projections—how could they have been so wrong? The captain stares down at the data being fed to him through the ship’s state-of-the-art navigational computer while the astronomers pore through their research for answers: No, no, this can’t be! Buzz Lightyear may have gone to infinity and beyond, but this is beyond the beyond. They’re about to enter the impossible galaxy—the galaxy that isn’t meant to exist.

The human race managed to go from the Wright Brothers’ first flight to Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon in just 66 years. Throughout all of human history, flight had eluded us century after century, and then suddenly, within one lifetime, it not only became possible but the technology accelerated so quickly that we were setting foot on another celestial body. It’s no wonder that science fiction writers in the 1960s were dreaming of mankind colonizing space by the 21st century. Yet here we are today, now having to rely on advancements in technology to land people on Mars. With technology advancing as quickly as ever, why are we no closer to a life among the stars? Surely we must know all there is to know about space by now. Are there any mysteries still out there, lurking beyond the reaches of our understanding? What will we find when we finally take off from this planet for good?

How about we try it? Together, let’s fast-forward 10,000 years into the future and take a trip out into the unknown reaches of space. What mysteries will we find that science tells us just shouldn’t be possible? Let’s discover an impossible galaxy!

Firstly, let’s begin with our ship. Way back in the 21st century, they used to say that interstellar travel was impossible, at least within your own lifetime. The speed of light, 299,792,458 m/s, is the theoretical speed limit of the universe. Nothing can go faster than that. If you were to accelerate up to 99.99% of the speed limit, it would take you 4.24 years just to get to our next-door neighbor star, Alpha Centauri. Considering there are between 100 and 400 billion stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way, and we’re nestled somewhere in the Milky Way’s inner city, it would take a ridiculously long time to get out this way. Earth is roughly 20,000 – 30,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way, but we know its radius is around 1 million light-years. How can we travel to another galaxy when it takes us 970,000 years just to reach the edge of our own?

To do any kind of intergalactic travel, humanity needed a cheat code, and we found one, but not in the place we were looking for. As we used up the last of our planet’s natural resources, our sun started to burn colder, and entropy steadily released our world’s energy as useless heat. We faced a real energy crisis. The human race was on the verge of extinction as our brightest scientists looked for a way to construct something to provide us with unlimited energy to keep up with our ever-growing population.

In came what’s called a Dyson Sphere. Once reserved only for the realm of science fiction, our advanced technology and global desperation finally caught up to the idea. The way it works is you find a celestial body like a star with enormous amounts of gravitational pull. Gravity, mass, and energy are all intertwined on a cosmic level. Where you find a source of one, you find the others.

At first, our sights were small. We constructed a simple shell around our sun, lined with solar panels. This gave us a large amount of energy, sure enough, but we were capable of so much more. So we upgraded from a star to something much more exciting: a black hole. By creating a stable man-made black hole ourselves, we were able to construct a new kind of Dyson Sphere. With this one, there were no solar panels. Instead, we left a small spot open on one part of it, through which we would launch tiny amounts of matter. The matter would whizz around inside, accelerating around the black hole to near the speed of light, building up large amounts of energy! These particles would fly away from the black hole so fast, they’d ping into the walls of the sphere. With each of those impacts, we could generate enormous amounts of energy. Almost free of charge, we now had a source of near-limitless energy.

The world became a utopia. World hunger was eliminated right away. Of course, we’d lost our sun, so we had to construct an artificial sky made from TV screens all around the Earth to give us light and extensive underfloor heating to keep us warm. But ignore those dystopian ideas; it was great!

And in the midst of all of this, we discovered something remarkable: the key to interstellar travel. An idea, long theorized since the publication of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, resurfaced and was quickly proven to be true: wormholes. Falling into the core of a black hole, not all matter is simply crushed into a singularity forever.

Going into the science of all of this is incredibly complex and theoretical, diving into the strangest and murkiest depths of both quantum and astrophysics, but we can give your 21st-century brain the TL;DR version. Black holes are so massive, they bend gravity beyond our ability to understand. When gravity bends, it pulls both space and time with it. So particles falling into a black hole theoretically go in one side and suddenly appear at a totally different point in space and time.

Trying to stabilize a wormhole so that it doesn’t just immediately collapse in on itself was very tricky. Trying to stretch one enough to send a human through was even harder. Then constructing a ship tough enough to enter a black hole and come out of the other side was practically impossible. But we’re in the future, and it works. Don’t ask too many questions. The point is, we’ve worked out a way to travel through wormholes and explore other galaxies. The only question that matters now is, are you in?

Good, then let’s go and discover an impossible galaxy. Strap in; we’re going to open the hatch on this Dyson Sphere and plummet through the heart of a wormhole. You might feel your spine crack a couple of times as the gravity stretches you out thinner than a piece of spaghetti… Hold on tight!

And we’ve made it! Welcome to the edge of the Milky Way, where we’re taking our first stop. If you look out the window, you can see the entire galaxy stretching out before you. You think you jumped a long way into the future traveling forwards 10,000 years? In the grand scale of this galaxy, that would amount to just 0.00007% of the time it’s existed—13.6 billion years old. It’s actually its birthday today, so we brought cake. Here’s a slice for you.

If the Milky Way is that old, then how old must the universe itself be? Surprisingly, it isn’t. The Milky Way is 13.6 billion years old. The universe itself is 13.8 billion years old—just a cool 200 million years between them. Our galaxy is almost the same age as the universe itself! Remember this, because it’s going to become really important later when we start to visit some of our other galaxies.

But for now, let’s just keep on taking this view. I can see my house from here. So can you. In fact, you can see everywhere you’ve ever been. That tiny dot is our sun. It’s one in 400 billion stars all slowly swirling around the galactic center: a supermassive black hole. This thing dwarfs the little Dyson Sphere black hole.

You’ve probably heard of it. It’s called Sagittarius A*, and it is around 4 million times the mass of our sun. Around it swirl a cluster of stars, all steadily getting closer and closer to falling in. The gravity from this galactic center is so strong that it’s able to pull entire stars into its orbit from a million light-years away.

We like to imagine our own sun as staying still and the Earth orbiting around it, but the reality is that our sun is even punier in comparison to this galactic center than our planet is to it. Our sun is 330,000 times as massive as the Earth. Sagittarius A* is 4 million times as massive as the sun. We are tiny! So tiny that even though our own sun is relatively close to the galactic center, it still takes 250 million years for our sun to complete one orbit around the Milky Way.

In between all of these stars isn’t just empty space either. There are planets, asteroids, and, most importantly for where we’re going next, nebulae. Enough sightseeing here; we’ve got plenty more traveling to do. Hope you’ve finished your cake because it’s time for us to plummet into another wormhole. Hold onto something. Or don’t. It’s going to be excruciatingly uncomfortable to be stretched out by gravity whether you’re holding something or not. Here we go!

That wasn’t so bad, was it? Welcome to our first impossible galaxy! So as not to blow your mind too much, we’re only going to take you to galaxies that have already been discovered, thanks largely to your latest cutting-edge telescope: the James Webb Space Telescope.

Launched on Christmas Day 2021, the JWST marked a big step forward from the Hubble telescope. Hubble operated by magnifying visible light to help astronomers see in greater detail what the night sky looked like. It was launched into orbit in 1990, an essential step as you can only see so much from ground level. After all, telescopes on the Earth’s surface have several miles of atmosphere between them and space.

Hubble wasn’t the first space telescope, but it was by far the most famous in human history as it presented such a tremendous leap forward in our ability to image the stars. It contains a 2.4m mirror with five main instruments. These instruments are capable of observing visible light, which is defined as all of the light that the human eye can see, as well as ultraviolet light and near-infrared light.

The most famous photo to come from the Hubble telescope was called the Pillars of Creation. It shows in rich color three pillars of gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula around 7,000 light-years from Earth. The reason it’s called the Pillars of Creation is that inside those nebulae, new stars are being formed. Plumes of gas and dust, thousands of miles in each direction, slowly converge under their own gravity, getting hotter and hotter until they reach critical mass and ignite into a star. It’s believed that every star in the universe was born from a gas cloud just like these.

And it’s precisely because of gas clouds that this galaxy we are in should not exist. Take a look around. Do you see what’s missing? Exactly, no gas clouds. But we’ll get to that in a moment because gas clouds are the reason why the James Webb Space Telescope was such an upgrade over Hubble.

The older telescope was operating mostly in the visible light spectrum or just outside of it. It’s fairly similar to how we see things, though with its colors modified and everything brightened significantly. It doesn’t stray too far outside of the visible light spectrum, so if there is something blocking those visible light rays from reaching it, Hubble cannot see through that object.

The Pillars of Creation, as beautiful as they are, also presented scientists with a problem. They couldn’t see what was on the other side. But fortunately, light behaves differently at different wavelengths. Infrared light has a long wavelength and can pass through things that would normally interfere and scatter visible light. The same thing applies to radio waves, which are also on the electromagnetic spectrum but even lower.

A radio mast can sit somewhere on the other side of a hill several miles away from you, but your radio can still pick up the signal just fine. Your phone can still get a signal even when you’re inside a building while the cell tower providing that signal is nowhere in sight.

And so the JWST launched with the ability to see the infrared spectrum, unlocking the option to see through gas clouds and pick up on light coming from much further away. Overnight, humanity now had access to see so much more of space than we ever had before, and we found this place: a dwarf galaxy called PEARLSDG.

Dwarf galaxies pop up all the time. Astronomers have quite a lot of them on record. Essentially, a dwarf galaxy is one that contains many fewer stars than a regular full-sized galaxy. It can be anything from 100 billion down to just 1,000 stars. They are usually found close to regular galaxies, orbiting them far away enough to be a separate body but close enough to circle them slowly. The Milky Way has 20 dwarf galaxies of various sizes in its orbit.

Astronomers believe that their formations are usually tied in with the regular galaxies they neighbor. Perhaps they wouldn’t have formed without having access to the gases slowly drawn to the larger galaxy, or they may have formed at the same time and been flung apart from one another.

They’re usually not that interesting. But this one, PEARLSDG, is. Because it shouldn’t exist. It was discovered almost by accident. Researchers at Arizona State University just happened to study this point in space while conducting other research. They weren’t expecting to see anything there. It was believed to be an empty point in space, and yet there was an entire galaxy sitting there waiting to be found.

And that was when they noticed what was so strange about PEARLSDG—something we pointed out earlier. There is no gas here. In other words, there are no new stars forming. Newly formed stars give off a very specific kind of electromagnetic radiation. You can look at a galaxy and right away see if there are new stars forming in it. PEARLSDG has nothing.

There are certain rules that apply in the cosmos—rules that can be observed happening repeatedly everywhere we look. One of those is that galaxies form stars. There is gas and dust in pretty much every galaxy in the universe. All of those stars and planets and black holes have a whole lot of gravitational pull. They all came from clouds floating in space, gradually clumping together from the force of their own gravitational attraction. That amount of gas doesn’t just get used up in one go; it’s an ongoing continuous process for billions upon billions of years.

Look at our Milky Way. It’s been alive almost as long as the universe itself, and yet there are stars still forming constantly. Estimates put it at between 4 and 7 new stars per year in the Milky Way. A galaxy that stops forming new stars is what is called a quiescent galaxy. That’s when there is no longer enough gas to keep forming stars.

There are usually only two ways that this gas gets removed. One is if there is a supermassive black hole in the center that is so powerful that it hoovers all of the remaining gas into itself, starving the rest of the galaxy of the clouds it needs to form new life. The other possibility is that the galaxy comes too close to another, larger galaxy. The gravitational pull from this interaction could be enough to drag away the gases, leaving the smaller galaxy empty.

But look around here again. Look at the galaxy’s core. Do you see a supermassive black hole at the center of PEARLSDG? Not one strong enough to hoover up all of the gas. This is only a dwarf galaxy; there are nowhere near the kind of internal gravitational forces to take it all.

And now look out, away from this galaxy and to its neighbors. Is there anything close by? Another large galaxy that could have stolen its gas? No. There is no evidence of any kind of interaction with another larger galaxy. PEARLSDG is one of the furthest away galaxies humanity has ever looked at. The closest galaxy to the Milky Way is Andromeda at 2.5 million light-years away. As we fly past PEARLSDG, we’re 98 million light-years from Earth.

And it’s alone. So where did all the gas go? This question has left astronomers and physicists with some quite fundamental questions. We have been confident for a long time now that we understand exactly how stars form and how galaxies work, but what if we don’t? What if there is more to it than we know? What if there are forces out there, systems that are much larger and further away than we’ve ever been able to see, that pull the cosmic strings on a level beyond our capacity to see?

With that in mind, it’s time for us to enter the wormhole one last time and take a trip to possibly one of the most confusing impossible galaxies. Ready? All aboard!

Welcome to CEERS-2112. Looks familiar? That’s because it’s what is known as a barred spiral galaxy, the same type as our own Milky Way. It’s characterized by this beautiful swirling disc full of bright stars and clouds of gases. And as much as PEARLSDG confused astronomers with its existence, this is one of dozens that have outright challenged our model of the universe.

To understand why, we need to quickly dive back into wavelengths of light. Remember how visible light sits in between infrared at the lower end with longer wavelengths and ultraviolet at the top end with shorter wavelengths? This is where that very simple knowledge can be used to unlock the biggest secret of them all: the origins of the universe.

When the Big Bang happened, it threw everything in all directions. It was a concentrated blast at a single point from which everything was flung away. Even though this happened around 14 billion years ago, everything is still moving outwards, giving us a tiny glimpse into just how powerful the Big Bang was. This means that the universe is expanding.

That means galaxies like CEERS-2112, where we are standing right now, are moving away from everything else. In the same way that our own Milky Way is moving away from everything. It’s all getting further apart as it spreads out, like ripples from a stone thrown in a lake. How can we tell? We look at the wavelengths.

Let’s say there is a perfectly white star hanging out in space. You stare up at it from Earth, and you can see that it’s perfectly white. There are perfectly uniform and smooth waves of light washing towards you. Now if that star were to start moving towards you, those waves would be squeezed together. The wavelengths would get shorter. That light would start to shift towards the UV spectrum. This is called blue-shift, and if we see an object emitting blue-shift light, it means that it is coming closer to us.

But when we look