The James Webb Space Telescope has found more than 1,000 galaxies that are mysteriously similar to our own.
Shaped like warped vinyl records, the remnants of our Milky Way Galaxy were found by JWST more than 10 billion years into the universe’s past during a period when violent galactic mergers were thought to have made the existence of many such fragile galaxies impossible. However, disc galaxies are 10 times more common in the early universe than astronomers previously thought.
This discovery adds to others made by JWST that point to a deeper mystery surrounding how large galaxies, and with them the potential for life, first blossomed in our universe.
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Most theories of galaxy formation begin 1 billion to 2 billion years after the universe began, when the first star clusters were thought to have transformed into dwarf galaxies.
These dwarf galaxies then began to cannibalize each other, triggering a game of violent galactic mergers that after 10 billion years led to large galaxies like our own. Using the Hubble Space Telescope we thought that disc galaxies were almost nonexistent until the universe was about 6 billion years old, the study’s authors said.
JWST’s new discoveries push the formation time of these galaxies similar to our own to almost the beginning of the universe.
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