The JWST detected giant galaxies in the early universe that had no business being there—it seemed like dark matter theory was crumbling. But astronomers accounted for errors in weighing starlight and realized: these 'monsters' don't contradict cosmology at all; we were simply miscalculating their mass. A recount set everything straight.
🎯 The effect that tricked astronomers is called Eddington bias. It was first described in a debate about measuring skulls: when you catch rare objects, the average appears larger than the true value.
🎬 In Carl Sagan's novel 'Contact,' the heroine receives a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization. Without precise corrections for cosmological distortions, the decoding could have gone down a false path—exactly like with these galaxies.