A Milky Way-like galaxy has been spotted in the distant universe by the Webb Telescope

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Astronomers have spotted an interesting phenomenon in the distant universe – a galaxy very similar to the Milky Way – and it challenges major theories about how galaxies evolve.

The distant system, called CEERS-2112, was observed by an international team using the James Webb Space Telescope.

Like our parent galaxy, the newly discovered Ceers-2112 galaxy is a barred spiral galaxy, and is now the most distant of its kind ever observed. The strip in the center of the structure is made of stars.

Ceers-2112 formed shortly after the Big Bang created the universe (which is estimated to be 13.8 billion years old), and the galaxy’s distinctive structure was already in place 2.1 billion years later.

Given the distance between Earth and objects from the early days of the universe, when telescopes like Webb observe light from the distant universe, it’s like looking back into the past.

“Unexpectedly, this discovery reveals that galaxies like ours already existed 11,700 million years ago, when the universe had only 15% of its life,” Luca Costantin, the study’s lead author, said in a statement. He is a postdoctoral researcher at the Spanish National Research Council at the Spanish Astrobiology Center in Madrid.

Astronomers were surprised to see such a well-ordered and orderly galaxy at a time when other galaxies were much more irregular. While massive spiral galaxies are common in the cosmic neighborhood of the Milky Way, this was not always the case.

This discovery, made possible by Webb’s extremely sensitive light-detecting capabilities, changes scientists’ understanding of galaxy formation and the early stages of the universe.

“The finding of CEERS-2112 shows that galaxies in the early universe could have been arranged like the Milky Way,” study co-author Alexander de la Vega, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Riverside, said in a statement. “This is surprising because galaxies were much more chaotic in the early universe and very few of them had structures similar to the Milky Way.”

A study detailing the findings was published November 8 in the journal nature.

Astronomers believed that barred spiral galaxies like the Milky Way did not appear until after the universe had reached at least half its current age because it was believed that it took several billion years of galactic evolution before massive clusters of stars within galaxies could form. Central bars. .

Bars form when stars within spiral galaxies orbit in an orderly manner, as they do in the Milky Way. Until now, astronomers did not believe that early galaxies were stable enough to form or persist bars.

But the discovery of Ceers-2112 suggests that this evolution took only about a billion years or less, de la Vega said.

“Almost all bars are found in spiral galaxies,” de la Vega said. “The bar in CEERS-2112 suggests that galaxies have matured and become organized much faster than we previously thought, which means that some aspects of our theories about galaxy formation and evolution need to be revised.”

De la Vega believes astronomers will need to change their theoretical models of how galaxies form and evolve by accounting for the amount of dark matter present in the first galaxies.

Although dark matter has not actually been discovered, it is thought to make up 85% of the total matter in the universe – something European Space Agency’s Euclid Telescope The map has been designed. Dark matter may have played a role in the formation of the bars.

This discovery also suggests that bars can be detected in early galaxies, even though the oldest galaxies are much smaller.

“The discovery of CEERS-2112 paves the way for the discovery of more bars in the young universe,” de la Vega said. “Initially, I thought that detecting and estimating the properties of bars in galaxies like SEARS-2112 would be fraught with measurement uncertainties. But the power of the James Webb Space Telescope and the expertise of our research team helped us establish strong constraints on the size and shape of the bar.”