Image courtesy of Weichen Wang
Joel Kontinen
“The Big Wheel, discovered using the James Webb Space
Telescope, formed just 2 billion years after the Big Bang - surprisingly early
for a spiral galaxy of a similar size to our Milky Way.”
“A newly-discovered spiral galaxy, dubbed the Big Wheel, formed just 2 billion years after the big bang – far earlier, considering its size, than astronomers thought possible.
Themiya
Nanayakkara, at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia,
says the discovery was an accident. He and his colleagues
were looking for quasars, energetic regions at the heart of some galaxies, with
the James Webb Space Telescope in November 2022 when a “large spiral galaxy
popped up”.
Source:
James Woodford 2025 Big Wheel: Giant Milky Way-like galaxy formed unusually soon after the big bang | New Scientist 17 March