MASHABLE - Astronomers previously thought it took billions of years for galaxies to become stable enough to develop so-called "bars," ribbons of stars and gas that cut across the core of a galaxy.
The Milky Way is an example of a barred spiral galaxy.
But a new James Webb Space Telescope discovery means scientists might have to toss out what they previously thought they knew about galaxy evolution. An international team has used the leading space observatory — a collaboration of NASA and the European and Canadian space agencies — to find the most distant barred spiral galaxy yet.
The galaxy, known as Ceers-2112, was observed with the telescope as it appeared in the early days of the universe, when the galaxy was only about 2 billion years old. Given that most scientists believe the universe is 13.8 billion years old today, that period can still be considered the universe's infancy, shortly after the Big Bang.
The bar in Ceers-2112 could mean that galaxies matured much faster than scientists have theorized, said Alexander de la Vega, an astronomer at the University of California, Riverside, in a statement.