The revolution that the observations of the James Webb telescope brought to the science of the Cosmos is beginning to bear fruit: a team of researchers led by the Center for Astrobiology (CAB) discovered the most distant galaxy similar to the Milky Way of the observed galaxies. so far, this revealed that the universe was better organized than thought from an early era.

The discovery made in August 2022, which publishes the journal Nature this Wednesday, shows a galaxy spiraling around a bar of stars – similar to the image of the Milky Way – that would have formed 11.7 billion years ago, when the universe was only 2.1 billion years old, 15% of its lifespan. at 13.8 billion years.

The discovery of ‘ceers-2112’, the scientific name researchers gave to the newly found galaxy, dismantles the view that the structure of spiral galaxies, such as the Milky Way, would not have been consolidated until the universe had reached half its current size. age (just under 7,000 million years ago).

“Our research shows that galaxies similar to the Milky Way already existed 11.7 billion years ago,” explains one of EFE’s lead authors, Luca Costantin, researcher at the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) of the CAB in Madrid. .

Costantin explains that ‘ceers-2112’ is considered a barred spiral galaxy “because it has spiral arms that revolve around a central region, where there is a bar-like structure of stars. And the most special thing is that the galaxy has as many stars as our galaxy at that time in the universe.” According to the newspaper El País, astrophysicist Pablo G. Pérez González compares the discovery to a 100-year-old person, who has never looked in the mirror, receiving a letter with a self-portrait sent to him by an unknown twin sister when he was 15 years old old.. It is the most distant Milky Way-like galaxy known.

70% of the galaxies known to date in the nearby universe have this spiral structure.

The observation of ‘ceers-2112’, the researcher emphasizes, was possible thanks to “the extraordinary capabilities” of the James Webb Space Telescope, whose technology and instrumentation allowed the discovery and study in detail of the morphology of distant galaxies like this one.

Specifically, the scientific data were collected during telescopic observations in a part of the sky located between the constellations Ursa Major and Boyero.

And this is just the beginning. Costantin further says: ‘We have eight to ten years of observations ahead of us with this telescope, which will enable the discovery of new galaxies and a better understanding of the physical processes that took place in the first phase of the universe’s existence to make.’

The next steps will therefore involve continuing to study the discovered galaxy to decipher its chemical composition and better understand it.

“Investigating how galaxies acquire the structure that characterizes them today is essential to understand the processes of formation and evolution of the Universe,” says another author, Cristina Cabello, researcher at the Institute of Particle and Cosmophysics of the Complutense University of Madrid. .

“The extraordinary observational work described and interpreted in this study identifies the unexpected existence of highly organized and gravitationally bound matter in the form of a barred galaxy, containing approximately 4 billion solar masses, at a time when the universe was only 2 billion had solar masses. years,” Juan Pérez-Mercader, principal investigator in physics applied to astrophysics and cosmology at Harvard University, told EFE. (JO)