The most distant Milky Way-like galaxy ever seen – a barred spiral galaxy – has been spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope and it is more than 11 billion years old
By Chen Ly
8 November 2023
Artistic representation of how the Milky Way-like galaxy ceers-2112 would look from Earth
Luca Costantin (CAB/CSIC-INTA)
Astronomers have spotted the earliest barred spiral galaxy yet. It is the same type of galaxy as our Milky Way, but it dates back to when the universe was just 2 billion years old, earlier than was thought possible.
Such galaxies have a distinctive bar-shaped structure in their centre made of stars, from which spiral arms stretch out.
About two-thirds of all spiral galaxies, including the Milky Way, have a prominent stellar bar filled with infant stars. Cosmic formation models have suggested that these galaxies only started forming some 4 billion years after the big bang. Now, Luca Costantin at the Spanish Astrobiology Centre and his colleagues have found an even older one.
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The researchers spotted the oddity in data from the James Webb Space Telescope’s Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) survey, which has captured new images of thousands of very distant galaxies.
“It looked a bit weird to me,” says Costantin. “We were not able to classify its shape at first.”