Yesterday I found the science article located at https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/02/230222115828.htm which is called "James Webb spots super old, massive galaxies that shouldn't exist". The article is dated February 22, 2023 (the same day I found it.) A summary of it says the following. "A team of international researchers have identified six candidate galaxies that existed roughly 500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang and are about as big as the modern Milky Way Galaxy -- a feat that scientists didn't think was possible." The article says in part the following.
'Each of the candidate galaxies may have existed at the dawn of the
universe roughly 500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang, or more
than 13 billion years ago. They’re also gigantic, containing almost as
many stars as the modern-day Milky Way Galaxy.
“It’s bananas,” said Erica Nelson, co-author of the new research and
assistant professor of astrophysics at the University of Colorado
Boulder. “You just don’t expect the early universe to be able to
organize itself that quickly. These galaxies should not have had time to
form.”
Nelson and her colleagues, including first author
Ivo Labbé of the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia,
published their results Feb. 22 in the journal Nature.
The latest finds aren’t the earliest galaxies observed by James Webb,
which launched in December 2021 and is the most powerful telescope ever
sent into space. Last year, another team of scientists spotted four
galaxies that likely coalesced from gas around 350 million years after
the Big Bang. Those objects, however, were downright shrimpy compared to
the new galaxies, containing many times less mass from stars.
... These primordial galaxies, however, probably didn’t have much in common with our own.
“The Milky Way forms about one to two new star every year,” Nelson
said. “Some of these galaxies would have to be forming hundreds of new
stars a year for the entire history of the universe.”
Nelson and her colleagues want to use James Webb to collect a lot
more information about these mysterious objects, but they’ve seen enough
already to pique their curiosity. For a start, calculations suggest
there shouldn’t have been enough normal matter—the kind that makes up
planets and human bodies—at that time to form so many stars so quickly.
“If even one of these galaxies is real, it will push against the limits of our understanding of cosmology,” Nelson said.'
To me this evidence supports the idea that the universe is much older than what the Big Bang theory says and even that universe (in some form) has always existed, and thus supports the idea that no deity created the universe, and thus it supports scientific naturalism. Regarding the idea that the universe possibly had no beginning see the science article called "What if the universe had no beginning? ". It says in part the following.
'Perhaps our universe has always existed — and a new theory of quantum gravity reveals how that could work.
"Reality
has so many things that most people would associate with sci-fi or even
fantasy," said Bruno Bento, a physicist who studies the nature of time
at the University of Liverpool in the U.K.
In his work, he employed a new theory of quantum gravity, called
causal set theory, in which space and time are broken down into discrete
chunks of space-time. At some level, there's a fundamental unit of space-time, according to this theory.
Bento
and his collaborators used this causal-set approach to explore the
beginning of the universe. They found that it's possible that the
universe had no beginning — that it has always existed into the infinite
past and only recently evolved into what we call the Big Bang.
... General relativity, on the other hand, is the most powerful and complete description of gravity ever devised.
But for all its strengths, general relativity is incomplete. In at least two specific places in the universe, the math
of general relativity simply breaks down, failing to produce reliable
results: in the centers of black holes and at the beginning of the
universe. These regions are called "singularities," which are spots in
space-time where our current laws of physics crumble, and they are
mathematical warning signs that the theory of general relativity is
tripping over itself. Within both of these singularities, gravity
becomes incredibly strong at very tiny length scales.
As such, to solve the mysteries of the singularities, physicists need a
microscopic description of strong gravity, also called a quantum theory
of gravity.
... causal set theory, reimagines space-time as a series of discrete chunks,
or space-time "atoms." This theory would place strict limits on how
close events can be in space and time, since they can't be any closer
than the size of the "atom."
... "A huge part of the causal set philosophy is that the passage of time
is something physical, that it should not be attributed to some
emergent sort of illusion or to something that happens inside our brains
that makes us think time passes; this passing is, in itself, a
manifestation of the physical theory," Bento said. "So, in causal set
theory, a causal set will grow one 'atom' at a time and get bigger and
bigger."
The causal set approach neatly removes the problem of the
Big Bang singularity because, in the theory, singularities can't exist.
It's impossible for matter to compress down to infinitely tiny points —
they can get no smaller than the size of a space-time atom.
... In our work instead, there would be no Big Bang as a beginning, as the
causal set would be infinite to the past, and so there's always
something before."
Their work implies that the universe may have had no beginning — that it
has simply always existed. What we perceive as the Big Bang may have
been just a particular moment in the evolution of this always-existing
causal set, not a true beginning.'
