James Webb telescope reveals huge spiral galaxy of "grand design" in the early Universe

Galaxies in the early Universe tend to be bulky, but now the James Webb Telescope has discovered an even larger spiral galaxy of "grand design." And scientists can't explain how it got so big and so fast.

According to LiveScience, this large swirl of stars is known as a spiral galaxy of grand design, and its extremely advanced age could change what science knows about galaxy formation. Since spiral galaxies are generally younger, this makes the newly discovered one an exception.

Generally, the older a galaxy is, the further away it is from us. Scientists can measure the age and distance of galaxies using what is known as the redshift, a phenomenon that occurs when light shifts to lower frequencies and redder wavelengths as it crosses large areas of space.

This happens for several reasons. First, because the Universe is expanding, old stars naturally fall farther away. Second, because red has the longest wavelength in the visible light spectrum, stars that are very far away tend to appear redder, having a larger redshift. The James Webb Telescope is designed to look deep into the red and infrared spectrum, allowing it to see old, distant galaxies more clearly than any previous telescope.

Large-design galaxies, such as the newly discovered one, are characterized by two well-defined spiral arms. According to the Las Cumbres Observatory, very few of them have ever been found with a redshift above 3.0 – meaning their light has traveled nearly 11.5 billion years.

Meanwhile, the newly discovered galaxy has a redshift of 4.03, which means that the light detected by the James Webb telescope was emitted more than 12 billion years ago. According to the researchers, this means that it was formed when the Universe was only about 1.5 billion years old – and it seems to have formed very quickly. Given the rate of star formation, it accumulated a mass of about 10 billion solar masses in just a few hundred million years. This contradicts scientists' ideas about how spiral galaxies usually form.

"The rarity of spirals with high redshift may be due to the fact that the galaxies were dynamically hot in those early epochs," write scientists from the National Center for Radio Astrophysics in India in a new study.

The scientists suggest that the formation of this galaxy could have been caused by the presence of a star bar, a gas structure found in most galaxies that fuels star formation and directs gas between the inner and outer regions of the galaxy, helping to shape its size and shape. The ancient spiral could also have formed as a result of the merger of two smaller galaxies, although, according to the researchers, this seems less likely given its ordered structure.

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