SPACE — Could Earth have a twin in a distant galaxy that is similar to ours? An international team of astronomers used the American Space Agency’s (NASA) James Webb Space Telescope to identify the most distant barred spiral galaxy similar to the Milky Way ever observed. The newly discovered galaxy, named ceers-2112, formed shortly after the Big Bang.
“The discovery of ceers-2112 suggests that galaxies in the early universe may have had the same order as the Milky Way,” said study co-author Alexander de la Vega, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California-Riverside.
This finding is quite surprising because galaxies generally had a more chaotic structure in the early days of the universe. Additionally, very few have a similar structure to the Milky Way.
De la Vega explained that the galactic bar is a structure in the galaxy that is composed of stars. This is similar to the structure of candy bars in our daily life. Although bars can be found in non-spiral galaxies, they are very rare.
“Almost all bars are found in spiral galaxies,” de la Vega said.
“The bars in ceers-2112 show that galaxies are maturing and organizing much faster than we previously thought, which means some aspects of our theories of galaxy formation and evolution need to be revised.”
Previously, astronomers believed that it would take billions of years for galaxies to become ordered enough to form bars. However, the discovery of ceers-2112 suggests that this transformation could occur in about a billion years or less.
Galactic bars are usually thought to form in spiral galaxies with regularly rotating stars, such as in the Milky Way. In these galaxies, bars can form spontaneously due to instability of the spiral structure or gravitational effects of neighboring galaxies.
The discovery of ceers-2112 is expected to have significant implications for the field of astronomy.
“First, theoretical models of galaxy formation and evolution need to take into account the few galaxies that became stable enough to host galaxies early in the history of the universe,” explains de la Vega.
“The discovery of ceers-2112 paves the way for more boundaries to be discovered in the young universe.”
The study was published in the journal Nature.
2023-11-11 03:54:00
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