Is Cosmology in Crisis?

April 11, 2024 • by Marc Airhart

A panel of physicists and astronomers grapple with possible cracks in our modern creation myth, the standard model of cosmology.

A dramatic spiral galaxy with orange and red arms and a light blue center

JWST’s image of spiral galaxy NGC 628, which is 32 million light-years away in the constellation Pisces. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Janice Lee (STScI), Thomas Williams (Oxford), and the PHANGS team.


Over the past year and a half, data and images from the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, have been flooding in. And floating around in that sea of data (and from other instruments over the past 20 years) are at least three big problems: There appear to be too many big, bright galaxies, too soon after the Big Bang. No one can agree on how fast the universe is (or was) expanding. And we don’t know what most of the universe is made of.

The University of Texas at Austin brought together a panel of astronomy and physics faculty members to debate and discuss the meaning of these emerging problems in the data. The panelists were Kim Boddy, Mike Boylan-Kolchin, Karl Gebhardt, Can Kilic and Julian Muñoz. Have a listen and then decide: is cosmology really in crisis?

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