While NASA searches for ancient alien life on Mars, astronomers have found a galaxy that looks a lot like our own Milky Way, only it’s 12 billion light-years away. This means that we’re seeing the galaxy as it appeared when the universe was only 1.4 billion years old (for reference, that’s 10 per cent of its current age).
Astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany used ALMA, or the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array of telescopes, in Chile to find the galaxy, which is called SPT0418-47. The telescope’s image of the galaxy was published in the journal Nature, alongside a study that describes the young galaxy as dynamically cold.
Previously, early galaxies were thought to be “dynamically hot, chaotic, and strongly unstable” (same TBH). But this image of the galaxy challenges this theory.
“This result represents a breakthrough in the field of galaxy formation, showing that the structures that we observe in nearby spiral galaxies and in our Milky Way were already in place 12 billion years ago,” said Francesca Rizzo, study co-author and postdoctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, in a statement.
“This result is quite unexpected and has important implications for how we think galaxies evolve,” added Simona Vegetti, study co-author and Max Planck Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics.