CNN - Astronomers have spied an intriguing phenomenon in the distant universe — a galaxy that closely resembles the Milky Way — and it’s challenging key theories on how galaxies evolve.
The faraway system, called ceers-2112, was spotted 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 it’s now the most distant of its kind ever observed. The bar at the center of the structure is made of stars.
“Finding ceers-2112 shows that galaxies in the early universe could be as ordered as the Milky Way,” said study coauthor Alexander de la Vega, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Riverside, in a statement. “This is surprising because galaxies were much more chaotic in the early universe and very few had similar structures to the Milky Way.”
A study detailing the findings was published November 8 in the journal Nature.