General relativity, early galaxy formation and the JWST observations

Abstract

The James Webb Space Telescope has recently detected massive, fully formed, galaxies at redshifts corresponding to few hundred million years after the Big-Bang. However, our current cosmological model cannot produce such massive systems so early in the lifetime of the universe. A number of theoretical solutions have been proposed, but they all appeal to exotic new physics and introduce rather excessive fine-tuning. In this essay, we outline a theoretical answer to the early galaxy-formation question, which operates within standard general relativity and standard cosmology, without appealing to any new physics. Instead, we account for the effect of a well established feature of our universe. This feature, which has so far been kept in the margins of mainstream cosmology, are the peculiar velocities.