Artistic illustration of how the Milky Way-like galaxy ceers-2112 would look from Earth
Luca Costantin (CAB/CSIC-INTA)
Astronomers have noticed the earliest barred spiral galaxy but. It is the identical sort of galaxy as our Milky Way, however it dates again to when the universe was simply 2 billion years previous, earlier than was thought possible.
Such galaxies have a particular bar-shaped construction of their centre manufactured from stars, from which spiral arms stretch out.
About two-thirds of all spiral galaxies, together with the Milky Way, have a distinguished stellar bar crammed with toddler stars. Cosmic formation fashions have steered that these galaxies solely began forming some 4 billion years after the massive bang. Now, Luca Costantin on the Spanish Astrobiology Centre and his colleagues have discovered a good older one.
The researchers noticed the oddity in knowledge from the James Webb Space Telescope’s Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) survey, which has captured new pictures of 1000’s of very distant galaxies.
“It looked a bit weird to me,” says Costantin. “We were not able to classify its shape at first.”
By cross-referencing with knowledge from the Hubble Space Telescope, the researchers recognized it as a barred spiral galaxy, which they named ceers-2112.
The galaxy’s gentle has been travelling since 2 billion years after the massive bang, which occurred about 13.7 billion years in the past. That makes ceers-2112 probably the most distant barred spiral galaxy ever found.
Simulations additionally counsel that the galaxy would have grown to the scale of the Milky Way by 4 billion years after the massive bang. “If we go back in time, the Milky Way may have looked like ceers-2112,” says Costantin, who says these observations might assist us enhance galaxy formation fashions and perceive how the Milky Way and different barred spiral galaxies developed within the early universe.
“Understanding and finding galaxies like the one we found is very important,” says Costantin. “It’s a way to look back in time the story of our galaxy and ultimately our origins.”
Topics:
- milky means/
- James Webb area telescope