James Space Telescope webb (JWST) has discovered more than 1,000 galaxies mysteriously similar to the Milky Way lurking in the early universe. Milky Way counterparts in the form of twisted vinyls and thin spiral arms have been found by JWST more than 10 billion years into the universe’s past; A period when violent galactic mergers were thought to make it impossible for such fragile galaxies to form in large numbers. to exist.

But a new study shows that disk galaxies were 10 times more common in the early universe than astronomers previously thought. This surprising discovery joins other discoveries made by JWST that indicate: deepen the mystery It is around how huge galaxies and with them the potential for life first emerged in our universe. The researchers published their findings September 22 in The Astrophysical Journal.

“For more than 30 years, these disk galaxies were thought to be rare in the early universe due to the normal violent collisions that galaxies undergo,” the study’s lead author, Leonardo Ferreira, an astronomer at the University of Victoria in Canada, said in a statement. . “The fact that JWST found so much is another indication of the power of this instrument and that galaxy structures were forming earlier in the Universe, in fact much earlier than anyone expected.”

Most theories regarding galaxy formation begin 1-2 billion years ago in the universe; It is thought that by this time the oldest star clusters had turned into dwarf galaxies. Eventually, these dwarf galaxies began to cannibalize each other, resulting in a violent galaxy merger that gave rise to massive galaxies like ours (after 10 billion years).

The Milky Way is a disk galaxy. With its spiral arms and squashed sombrero shape, it is one of the most common types of galaxies in the modern universe. But in the early years of the universe—when space was denser and full of dwarf galaxies—astronomers had long assumed that galaxies like ours would rapidly lose their shape.

However, astronomers using JWST to look back 9 to 13 billion years found that 1,672 of the 3,956 galaxies they observed were disk galaxies like ours. Most of these galaxies existed when the universe was only a few billion years old.

“Using the Hubble Space Telescope, we reasoned that disk galaxies hardly existed until the universe was about 6 billion years old,” study co-author Christopher Conselis, professor of extragalactic astronomy at the University of Manchester, said in a statement. “These new JWST results push back the time of formation of Milky Way-like galaxies almost to the beginning of the universe.”

“This means that most stars exist and form in these galaxies, which completely changes our understanding of how galaxies form,” he added. “Based on our results, astronomers should revise our understanding of the formation of the first galaxies and how galaxies have evolved over the last 10 billion years.”

Our existence in a disk galaxy means that astronomers generally assume that they must have good conditions for the origin of life. If this is the case, it is highly likely that life appeared in the universe earlier than thought.