In February this year there was a lot of hype in the media about how the James Webb Space Telescope may bave broken the universe. There was even a
thread here on ATS about it:
An astronomer on the Youtube channel Dr. Becky released a video a few days ago saying she thinks the Universal Stellar IMF (Initial Mass Function)
used in the paper that suggested our model of the universe might be broken, was probably an incorrect or bad assumption. The early universe was in a
"hot dense state" as you can hear in the theme song of the TV show Big Bang Theory, and at higher temperatures, stellar formation occurs
differently. So how should we account for star formation at higher temperatures? This paper cited by Dr. Becky proposes a solution and apparently the
James Webb observations of the "apparently massive" old galaxies fits our existing models, after accounting for the higher temperature that existed
closer to the big bang.
A universal stellar initial mass function (IMF) should not be expected from theoretical models of star formation...
which was precisely the
(apparently wrong or bad) assumption used in the paper suggesting the universe might be "broken", a universal IMF. This paper discusses why that's
a bad assumption, but Dr. Becky said it was still quite common for astronomers to make that assumption.
Here is Dr. Becky explaining why she thinks this probably solves the discrepancy though she reserves some healthy skepticism that there could be more
to learn, a good assumption to make with a new telescope in service making new discoveries.
JWST's "too massive" galaxy problem solved?! | A non-universal IMF