The “rebellious” neighbor of the Milky Way interests scientists: it is very advanced for its time

The mysterious galaxy contains the oldest and most distant rotating disk ever found. It's similar to our galaxy, although it formed at a time when only 5% of the universe existed, when galaxies were young.

A galaxy eerily similar to our own turns out to be much more mysterious than astronomers thought.

nickname Rebels -25The strange galaxy consists of the farthest, and therefore oldest, rotating disk ever observed. Furthermore, it has spiral arms that resemble the arms of “young” galaxies like our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

This “renegade” galaxy was discovered using the radio telescopes of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) network in Chile, as it was before. 700 million years After the big bang. During this period, galaxies are expected to be small and without a specific structure.

Astronomers believe that these early galaxies evolved the shape of their contemporaries over billions of years through collisions and mergers that slowly sculpted their disks and spiral arms. For this reason, modern galaxies, such as the Milky Way, took billions of years to develop their well-defined arms and other features.

The problem is that the Rebel-25 It has a similar structure to our galaxy despite belonging to a time when the universe was only 5% of its current age of 13.5 billion years, which defies the time scale.

“Seeing a galaxy similar to our own Milky Way, which is strongly rotation-dominated, challenges our understanding of the speed at which galaxies in the early universe evolve into the organizing galaxies of the present universe,” the study leader admitted. published In the magazine Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Lucy Rowland.

When astronomers first observed REBELS-25 using ALMA, they were dazzled by the signs of rotation, and new observations confirm that it is, in fact, The oldest and most distant rotating galaxy ever seen. The renegade galaxy also appears to have more features similar to the Milky Way, such as a central “bar” of stars.

If the existence of this structure is confirmed, REBELS-25 could become the oldest spiral galaxy ever observed. For now, the title belongs to Cheers-2112It was discovered by James Webb.

“Finding more evidence of more advanced structures will be an exciting discovery, because it will be the most distant galaxy in which such structures have been observed so far,” the study leader concluded.