The things not on earth are confounding the scientists.
Using the James Webb scope, we can look back to relatively close to the time of the Big Bang.
Scientists are pretty sure how long ago that was - there are about 4 ways to measure it, and they agree.
Buggeration is, that what we see is far more galaxies than we can explain out there/back then, and each would have taken far longer than the time they had, to form, according to our understanding.
They shouldn't be there.
So either we're wrong about the age of the universe , which throws our entire understanding of physics into the bin or
there was something around before the big bang. That appeals to me far more, but I don't fully understand about those 4 agreeing methods which make that impossible. Scientist are clinging to the big bang - our "cosmological model" because they DO trust the age of it.
Or there was a different set of laws of physics which allowed those galaxies to form really fast. Or something.
Maybe there were great concentrations of dark matter which produced incredibly strong gravitational fields which - obviously - affect time. I'm prattling above my pay grade now.
A researcher in the UK (Leicester?) called Lopez discovered it first, along with structures in what we can see of the universe, which again, shouldn't be there. ("Giant arc" etc).
Nobody has said yet, afaik, "but she was only a woman"!
TFFT!