By 3 News online staff
Astronomers have found a 10.7 billion-year-old spiral galaxy ? much older than any other found.
BX442, as the galaxy is known, was photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope. Its unlikely shape was reported in the latest edition of scientific journal Nature.
?As you go back in time to the early universe, galaxies look really strange, clumpy and irregular, not symmetric," says?UCLA astronomer Alice E Shapley.
"The vast majority of old galaxies look like train wrecks. Our first thought was, why is this one so different, and so beautiful?"
Light from BX442 left the galaxy only 3 billion years after the Big Bang.
"The fact that this galaxy exists is astounding," says University of Toronto astronomer David R Law. "Current wisdom holds that such grand design spiral galaxies didn't exist at such an early time in the history of the universe."
At first the team, headed by Law, thought they were looking at two galaxies who just happened to align in a way that looked like a spiral galaxy. Further research however showed it is indeed a rotating spiral galaxy, similar to the one we inhabit.
It's believed BX442's spiral shape developed because of gravitational interactions with a nearby, smaller galaxy. ?Computer simulations by co-author Charlotte Christensen of the University show it's likely the two galaxies later merged, and BX442 would then lose its spiral.
3 News
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