The Cosmic Timeline Implied by the JWST Reionization Crisis

JWST's discovery of well-formed galaxies and supermassive black holes only a few hundred Myr after the big bang, and the identification of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) at $z=6.71$, seriously challenge the timeline predicted by ΛCDM. Now, a recent analysis of reionization after JWST by Munoz et al. (2024) has concluded that the ΛCDM timeline simply cannot accommodate the combined JWST-Planck observations even if exotic fixes are introduced to modify the standard reionization model. In this paper, we argue that this so-called `photon budget crisis' is more likely due to flaws in the cosmological model itself. We employ the standard reionization model using the JWST-measured UV luminosity function in the early Universe and the timeline and physical conditions in both ΛCDM and Rₕ=ct. We then contrast the predicted reionization histories in these two scenarios and compare them with the data. We confirm that the reionization history predicted by ΛCDM is in significant tension with the observations, and demonstrate that the latter are instead in excellent agreement with the Rₕ=ct timeline. Together, the four anomalies uncovered by JWST provide strong evidence against the timeline predicted by ΛCDM and in favor of the evolutionary history in Rₕ=ct.