STUDY FINDS - Could Earth have a twin in a distant galaxy that looks just like ours? Scientists have made an astronomical discovery that disputes previous theories of galaxy formation. An international team of astronomers used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to identify the most distant barred spiral galaxy similar to our Milky Way ever observed. This finding challenges previous beliefs that galaxies like this one couldn’t be observed until the universe was much older.
The newfound galaxy, ceers-2112, was formed shortly after the Big Bang.
“Finding ceers-2112 shows that galaxies in the early universe could be as ordered as the Milky Way,” says study co-author Alexander de la Vega, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California-Riverside, in a university release. “This is surprising because galaxies were much more chaotic in the early universe and very few had similar structures to the Milky Way.”