What did the Milky Way look like shortly after its creation? It offers at least a partial answer The James Webb Space Telescopewhich discovered its young “twin” at a distance of 9 billion light years from us. The young galaxy has been nicknamed the Sparkler and offers an approximate view of what our home Galaxy looked like just a few billion years after the Big Bang.
A mirror of ancient history
The galaxy, whose size corresponds to about three percent of the size of today’s Milky Way, was studied by astronomers Duncan Forbes from Australia’s Swinburne University and Aaron Romanowsky from the American University of San Jose in California. The results of their observations recently published magazine Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters.
The sparkler galaxy is nicknamed because of more than twenty globular star clusters that resemble sparks flying out of a lit sparkler. In addition to globular star clusters, there are also several dwarf galaxies in its vicinity, which the Sparkle will probably absorb over time in a similar way, as our Milky Way has done in the course of history.
TIP: Milky Way’s ‘Twins’: How Unique Is Our Home Galaxy?
The JWST view shows the galaxy as it looked when the universe was only four billion years old (roughly a third of the current age of the universe). According to scientists, this means that the Sparkle, like the Milky Way, was formed very early, and its further fate largely resembles the development of the Milky Way. It is so likely that within 9 billion years it gave rise to a galaxy very similar to ours.
