12-Billion-Year-Old Milky Way Twin Shocks Astronomers

12-Billion-Year-Old Milky Way Twin Shocks Astronomers

A surprisingly well-formed spiral galaxy has been spotted just a billion years after the Big Bang, challenging long-held beliefs about how quickly galaxies evolve. Named Zhúlóng, after a Chinese solar dragon, it looks remarkably like our Milky Way, with spiral arms, a central bulge, and a sprawling disk of stars. Detected by the James Webb [...]

Milky way has a twin jwst finds fully formed galaxy 1 billion years after big bang

An image of Zhúlóng the earliest and most distant spiral galaxy ever seen (Image credit: NASA/CSA/ESA, M. Xiao (University of Geneva), G. Brammer (Niels Bohr Institute), Dawn JWST Archive)Astronomers have discovered the most distant and thus earliest spiral galaxy ever seen, using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). This "twin" of the Milky Way existed just 1 billion years after the Big Bang, challenging our theories of galactic evolution.Pre…