Using data from the James Webb Space Telescope, An international team of researchers has found the most distant galaxy similar to the Milky Way. Named ceers-2112, this “galactic twin” caught the attention of scientists because it was born shortly after the Big Bang. A study describing the discovery was published in the journal Nature.
Barred spiral galaxy
Just like the Milky Way, ceers-2112 is a barred spiral galaxy, that is, it has a spiral shape with a central bar of bright stars that extend from one side to the other. “Finding ceers-2112 shows that galaxies in the early universe could be as ordered as the Milky Way,” said Alexander de la Vega, a researcher at the University of California-Riverside, in the United States, and co-author of the study. “This is surprising because galaxies were much more chaotic during this period and very few had structures similar to the Milky Way,” he added.
Previously, astronomers believed it took several billion years for galaxies to become ordered enough to develop bars. “The discovery of ceers-2112 shows that this can only happen in a fraction of that time, in about a billion years or less,” said de la Vega. “Contrary to what was expected, this discovery reveals that galaxies similar to the Milky Way already existed 11.7 billion years ago”, added Luca Costantin, researcher at the Astrobiology Center in Madrid, Spain and leader of the study.
“With the James Webb Space Telescope, for the first time we have the technology and instrumentation necessary to study in detail the morphology of very distant galaxies,” said Cristina Cabello, researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid and co-author of the study. “Investigating how galaxies acquire the structure that characterizes them today is essential for understanding their formation and evolution processes”he concluded.
2023-11-11 04:19:55
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