The most distant galaxy discovered: similar to the Milky Way

Using the Webb Telescope, astronomers have spotted an intriguing phenomenon in the distant Universe – a galaxy that closely resembles the Milky Way – and the discovery challenges key theories about how galaxies evolve.

The distant system, named ceers-2112, was discovered by an international team using the James Webb Space Telescope.

Like our home galaxy, the newly discovered ceers-2112 is a barred spiral galaxy and is currently the most distant galaxy of its kind ever observed. The lintel in the center of the structure is made of stars, CNN reports.

Ceers-2112 formed shortly after the big bang created the universe (estimated to be 13.8 billion years old), and the galaxy’s distinct structure emerged 2.1 billion years later.

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

“Unexpectedly, this discovery shows that galaxies similar to our own existed as early as 11,700 million years ago, when the Universe was only 15% alive,” lead study author Luca Costantin said in a statement. He is a postdoctoral researcher at the Spanish National Research Council at the Spanish Center for Astrobiology in Madrid.

Astronomers were surprised to see such a well-ordered and structured galaxy at a time when others were much more irregular. Although massive spiral galaxies are common in the Milky Way’s cosmic environment, this was not always the case.

The discovery, made possible by the Webb telescope’s highly sensitive light-detecting capabilities, changes scientists’ understanding of the formation of galaxies and the early stages of the universe.

“The discovery of ceers-2112 shows that galaxies in the early Universe may have been as orderly as the Milky Way,” study co-author Alexander de la Vega, a 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 in the journal Nature.

Astronomers believed that barred spiral galaxies such as the Milky Way did not appear until the Universe was at least half its current age, since it was thought that it took several billion years of galactic evolution before massive clusters of stars within galaxies were able to form central stripes.

The streaks take shape when stars inside spiral galaxies rotate in an orderly manner, as happens in the Milky Way. Until now, astronomers didn’t believe that early galaxies were stable enough to form stripes or to last long.

But the discovery of ceers-2112 showed that this evolution took only about 1 billion years or less, notes de la Vega.

“Almost all the pillars are in spiral galaxies,” de la Vega said. “The band in ceers-2112 suggests that galaxies were maturing and ordering much faster than we previously thought, meaning that some aspects of our theories of galaxy formation and evolution need to be revised.”

De la Vega believes that astronomers will need to change their theoretical models of galaxy formation and evolution to take into account the amount of dark matter contained in the earliest galaxies.

Although dark matter has never actually been discovered, it is thought to make up 85% of the total matter in the universe—and that’s what the European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope was designed to map.