Surprising Discovery of Two Ancient Galaxies Exposes Our Cloudy View of the Cosmos - Gizmodo

The presence of two previously undetected galaxies some 29 billion light years away suggests our understanding of the early universe is upsettingly deficient.

The light from these galaxies took 13 billion years to get here, as these objects formed shortly after the Big Bang.

The ongoing expansion of the universe places these ancient galaxies at roughly 29 billion light years from Earth.

The astronomers compared the two newly detected galaxies to previously known galactic sources in the early universe, leading them to suspect that “up to one in five of the earliest galaxies may have been missing from our map of the heavens,” Oesch said.

To which he added: “Before we can start to understand when and how galaxies formed in the Universe, we first need a proper accounting.” Indeed, the new paper asserts that more ancient galaxies existed in the early universe than previously believed.