Resembles the Milky Way Scientists discover unusually old spiral galaxy

An international team led by the University of Geneva has discovered the most distant spiral galaxy known to date. The system was formed a billion years after the Big Bang, which is really early.

According to current knowledge, the formation of large spiral galaxies such as our Milky Way would actually take several billion years. But the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is beginning to reveal other scenarios. These discoveries include a candidate spiral galaxy - a galaxy whose confirmation is still pending, as the University of Geneva (Unige) announced on Wednesday.

It would be the most distant galaxy ever identified, according to Unige. It has been dated to just one billion years after the Big Bang, which is very early in the history of the universe.

Despite this early date, the galaxy has an astonishingly mature structure: an old central bulge - a large star-forming disk and spiral arms. These are features that are normally only found in galaxies that are much further away from the Big Bang.

The "torch dragon" resembles the "Milky Way"

This galaxy was christened Zhúlóng, which means "torch dragon" in Chinese mythology, said Mengyuan Xiao, lead author of the study. Zhúlóng is characterized by its similarity to the Milky Way, both in shape and in size and stellar mass. Its disk stretches over more than 60,000 light years, which is comparable to our own galaxy, and contains more than 100 billion solar masses of stars.

The "Gaia" probe is running out of airThe eye into the galaxy goes blind

This configuration makes the discovery one of the most convincing analogs of the Milky Way ever discovered at such an early stage. It raises new questions about how massive and well-ordered spiral galaxies could form so soon after the Big Bang, Unige added.

According to Unige, it was previously assumed that spiral structures take billions of years to develop and that massive galaxies only exist much later in the universe, as they normally form after the merging of smaller galaxies.

James Webb telescope uncovers sensationThere are auroras on Neptune

According to Pascal Oesch, Associate Professor in the Department of Astronomy at Unige, this discovery shows that the JWST fundamentally changes our picture of the early universe. The astronomers expect to find more galaxies of this type in the course of further JWST investigations. This could lead to a better understanding of the complex processes that shaped the galaxies in the early universe. The work is published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.