Discovery of a Shockingly Old Spiral Galaxy Surprises Astronauts

The astronomers have stumbled upon a strange spiral galaxy that appears to have been formed a billion years before other spirals. What makes this discovery strange is that this spiral galaxy is 10.5 billion light years from Earth, which places it at a time when the Universe was only three billion years old and spirals were few. 

A very rare discovery made by the astronomers from the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto comes as something of a surprise because it is reshuffling the standard thinking about the formation of florid structures.

The astronomers have stumbled upon a strange spiral galaxy that appears to have been formed a billion years before other spirals. What makes this discovery strange is that this spiral galaxy is 10.5 billion light years from Earth, which places it at a time when the Universe was only three billion years old and spirals were few.

"Seeing this galaxy amongst the irregular, young galaxies of that epoch is like seeing a fully-formed adult in a room of grade-school children," says Dunlap Institute postdoctoral fellow and Principal Investigator David Law. "The fact that this galaxy exists is astounding. Current wisdom holds that such grand-design spiral galaxies simply didn't exist at such an early time in the history of the Universe."

Based on the images produced by NASA's Hubble space telescope, Law and his colleagues studied the features of nearly 300 distant galaxies. The new found galaxy BX442 was the one spiral bunch spotted.

"Lo and behold, with no warning, BX442 and its spiral galaxy just popped out of the image. We couldn't believe it!" Alice Shapley of the University of California Los Angeles told AFP of the find reported in Nature journal. "We were not expecting such a beautiful pattern, given that the vast majority of star-forming galaxies in the early universe look so irregular and lumpy. BX442 is the first "grand design" spiral galaxy to be observed so early in history."

According to scientists "grand design" galaxy has prominent, well-formed spiral arms.

Though Hubble depicted the galaxy's spiral images, but he images received were not sufficient to solve the mystery of whether the galaxy rotated. With the aid of Keck II telescope in Hawaii to examine the galaxy's internal motions, Law and Shapely found an answer to their question.  Keck II produced sharp images as those taken by Hubble because the laser guide star adaptive optics system corrects for the distortions of incoming light triggered by the Stormy atmosphere existing in Earth. The researchers utilized an integral-field spectrograph called OSIRIS on the Keck II telescope to view the light from different parts of the galaxy. And based on these samples the scientists revealed that those parts were moving at different speeds when compared to us, indicating the spiral galaxy rotates approximately as fast as our own Milky Way Galaxy.

The calculations also suggest, however, that the merger would be rapid and that the spiral would disappear after a relatively brief 100 million years. The astronomers plan to continue studying BX442 for further insights that could shed light on how spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way come to be.

"BX442 represents a link between early galaxies that are much more turbulent and the rotating spiral galaxies that we see around us," Shapley said. "Indeed, this galaxy may highlight the importance of merger interactions at any cosmic epoch in creating grand design spiral structure."