Out in the depths of space, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is already revolutionizing what we thought we'd find as far as distant galaxies go. However, the claim that "This disproves the Big Bang" isn't being made scientifically, but rather by a crackpot attempting to prop up his long-discredited ideas. Here's what we know, based on their actual scientific merits and in context, so you won't get fooled: not now, and not ever. //

A recent revolutionary assertion has gone viral, claiming that the Big Bang never happened, and that the latest data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has proven it. The notion of the Big Bang has never sat well with many — all the way from its earliest incarnations in the 1920s (via Georges Lemaître) and the 1940s (from George Gamow; apparently you had to be named “George” to realize this) — and has been continuously challenged since its inception. However, the evidence has remained overwhelmingly in its favor ever since the 1960s, and no other serious competitors have ever been able to reproduce its successes. Which leads one to wonder: what are the merits, if any, of this latest claim? Could it be true, and if so, how and why? //

The modern Big Bang

Originally, the Big Bang was a simple idea that grew out of three facts, all put together.

1. In Einstein’s general theory of relativity, a Universe filled with any uniform distribution of matter and/or energy will not be stable in a static configuration: the fabric of space in that Universe must either contract or expand.
2. Observationally, there are spirals and ellipticals in the sky, and they lie well beyond the Milky Way; their distances can be measured.
3. Also observationally, the light from these spirals and ellipticals appears to be shifted, with more distant objects exhibiting a greater redshift in direct proportion to their distance: consistent with an expanding Universe.

By combining these three facts, we’d conclude that the Universe — if it’s expanding and becoming less dense today — must have been smaller and denser in the past. We can extrapolate this back farther and farther, to even very early times if we like, and recognize that our modern Universe must have emerged from a denser, smaller, more uniform state in the very distant past.

The first person to synthesize this information together was Georges Lemaître, who did it in 1927, although others would independently come to the same conclusion, including Howard Robertson in 1928, Edwin Hubble in 1929, and Arthur Walker a few years later. //

It might be hard to believe, but we only started seeing our very first science results from the JWST in mid-July, 2022. (That recently, really!) Perhaps the biggest surprise — other than the astounding technical performance of the telescope, which is arguably twice as good as it was designed to achieve on many fronts — is what it’s seen in the realm of galaxies. While we knew JWST would push far past what Hubble’s limited capabilities have seen, we had no idea its performance would be so revolutionary in such an early stage of its observation campaigns.

• There are greater numbers of galaxies out there than Hubble ever saw, including at distances that Hubble would never be sensitive to.
• Some of these galaxies appear more evolved, more massive, and at earlier stages than not only we’d previously seen, but than many models and simulations had expected.
• Some of them might even be massive and quite evolved at epochs between 200 and 350 million years after the Big Bang; the current confirmed record-holder, from Hubble, was already 407 million years after the Big Bang.
• Many of these galaxies, even the earliest ones, are shaped like disks, rather than being irregular. JWST’s superior resolving power and imaging capabilities have shown this even for galaxies that previously, with Hubble, looked like irregular blobs.
• And finally, nearby galaxies, in contrast to what Hubble saw, appear smaller and more compact with JWST’s improved resolution.