Washington Post article by Joel Achenbach, August 26, 2022 states, “The very distant universe looks a little different than expected. . . . Observing these ‘early’ galaxies is one of the main missions of the telescope – to see deeper into space and further back in time, than any previous telescope. . . . A general assumption had been that early galaxies – which formed not long after the first stars ignited – would be relatively small and misshapen. Instead, some of them are big, bright and nicely structured. . . . The ones that look the reddest – that have the highest redshift – are presumed to be the farthest away.”
“The models just don’t predict this,” Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California at Santa Cruz, said of the massive early galaxies. “How do you do this in the universe at such an early time? How do you form so many stars so quickly?”

What has surprised astronomer Dan Coe of the Space Telescope Science Institute are the number of nicely shaped, disk like galaxies. “We thought the early universe was this chaotic place where there’s all these clumps of star formation, and things are all a-jumble.”

Maybe, if scripture is correct and the earliest formations are spiritual, it might make a lot of sense. If the first seven billion light years of our universe is spirit and the last 6.8 billion years is physical, these (13.5 billion years ago) new galaxies may be spiritual matter and may appear exactly as theists might expect. We cannot see spirit or dark matter for that matter but we know it is there because of gravitational lensing that appears very redshifted.
What do we know about spiritual matter?

“For I, the Lord God, created all things, of which I have spoken, spiritually, before they were naturally upon the face of the earth” (Moses 3:5).
In Genesis we learn that there are generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created. A time of creation of plants, herbs, etc. before they grew or before God had made them physical and rain was needed (Genesis 2:3-4). Scripture indicates it to be seven periods of time, revolutions, or orbits for spiritual organization called the first estate. The second estate is the physical seven periods of time (Abraham 3:25-26).

The spiritual matter is from the beginning, mature and organized. Scripture tells us the brother of Jared saw the spiritual Jesus had a body like that of a grown man even before he was born on this earth (Ether 3:6-16). Jesus told the brother of Jared, “Behold, this body, which ye now behold, is the body of my spirit; and man have I created after the body of my spirit; and even as I appear unto thee to be in the spirit will I appear unto my people in the flesh.” This would account for why our view of the earliest formations of spiritual dark matter galaxies are already big, bright and nicely structured.
In the online magazine, INVERSE, July 20, 2022, Science Section we read, “Webb Telescope Data Reveals Oldest Galaxy Every Seen—And it’s not what Astronomers Expected.
“. . . it’s a cosmic surprise that challenges key ideas about what the early universe was like. Galaxy, GLASS-z13 is 13.5 billion light years away, 300 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was still very young. It smashes some assumptions about when galaxies started to form, how quickly they grew, and how many we can expect to find in the most distant reaches of the universe and are surprisingly bright, ‘remarkably luminous.’ The early GLASS-z11, similar to our galaxy, is about 2,300 light years wide. Milky Way today is about 100,000 light years wide. This was expected.”
Scripture also explains this in its description of spiritual matter. “There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes” (Doctrine and Covenants 131:7). Not only does this tell us why we cannot see spiritual dark matter it also tells us it is more fine or denser and may account for why an early galaxy similar to our Milky Way may not appear as wide as our physical much less dense but same mass galaxy of today.
SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT – M. Kasey