An international team, including astronomer Alexander de la Vega from the University of California, Riverside, has discovered the most distant Milky Way-like barred spiral galaxy ever observed using the James Webb Space Telescope. Until now, it was thought that barred spiral galaxies such as the Milky Way could not be observed until the universe, estimated to be 13.8 billion years old, was half its current age.

A study published this week NatureIt was conducted by scientists from the Centro de Astrobiología in Spain.

“This galaxy, called Ceers-2112, formed shortly after the Big Bang,” said co-author de la Vega, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. “The discovery of Ceers-2112 suggests that galaxies in the early universe may have been as ordered as the Milky Way. This is surprising because galaxies were much more chaotic in the early universe, and very few had structures similar to the Milky Way.”

There is a bar in the center of Ceers-2112. De la Vega explained that the galactic bar is a structure made up of stars in galaxies. Galaxy sticks are similar to sticks in our daily life, for example monoblock. According to him, you can find bars in non-spiral galaxies, but they are very rare.

“Almost all the bars are in spiral galaxies,” said de la Vega, who joined UCR last year after earning a doctorate in astronomy at Johns Hopkins University. “The bar in Ceers-2112 shows that galaxies are maturing and becoming ordered much faster than we previously thought, which means that some aspects of our theories of galaxy formation and evolution need to be revised.”

Astronomers’ previous understanding of galaxy evolution was that it took several billion years for galaxies to become organized enough to form columns.

“The discovery of CEERS-2112 suggests that this could happen in a very short time, about a billion years or less,” de la Vega said. said.

Galactic bars are thought to form in spiral galaxies with regularly rotating stars, such as in the Milky Way, he said.

“In such galaxies, bars may form spontaneously due to instability of the spiral structure or due to the gravitational effects of the neighboring galaxy,” de la Vega said. “In the past, when the universe was very young, galaxies were unstable and chaotic. It was thought that bars could not form or persist for long in galaxies in the early universe.”

The discovery of Ceers-2112 is expected to change at least two aspects of astronomy.

“First, theoretical models of galaxy formation and evolution must take into account that some galaxies became stable enough to have bars very early in the history of the universe,” de la Vega said. “Since dark matter is thought to affect the rate at which bars form, these models may need to be adjusted for how much dark matter formed galaxies in the early universe. Second, the discovery of ceers-2112 shows that line-like structures can be detected when the universe was very young. This is important because galaxies in the distant past were much more dense than in the present.” “It was smaller, making it harder to find bars. The discovery of Ceers-2112 leads to the discovery of more bars in the young universe.”

Dr. de la Vega assisted the research team by predicting the redshift and properties of Cers-2112. He also contributed to the interpretation of measurements.

“Redshift is an observable property of a galaxy that tells us how far away the galaxy is and how far back in time the galaxy can be seen, which is a result of the finite speed of light,” he said.

What surprised de la Vega most about the discovery of Ceers-2112 was how well the properties of its bar could be constrained.

“At first I thought that detecting and predicting bar properties in galaxies like Ceers-2112 would be fraught with measurement uncertainty,” he said. “But the power of the James Webb Space Telescope and the expertise of our research team helped us impose strong constraints on the size and shape of the band.” Source