Unheard of by scientists: there is a galaxy twin to the Milky Way

In the vast universe, each scientific advance can completely change what we took for granted. Sometimes, the greatest discoveries do not occur as a result of intense searches, but appear by surprise, hidden in data that seemed routine. This is just what happened with Zhulong, a colossal spiral galaxy that was captured almost by accident by the James Webb space telescope, at a distance of more than 12 billion light years. Its finding is not only …

© NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/NASA/CSA/ESA/M. Xiao (University of Geneva)/G. Brammer (Niels Bohr Institute)/D. de Martin & M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab) Spiral galaxy Zhulong questions theory: It was created only 1 billion years after the Big Bang – ten times faster than expected.