Paris-Sana
Astronomers from several countries announced that they have discovered a small galaxy 12 billion light-years away from Earth that resembles "to a large extent" the Milky Way with a ring of light in the heart of darkness.
Agence France-Presse quoted the European Southern Observatory, which participated in this discovery, as saying in a statement: “This galaxy called (SPT 0418 -47) is so far away that its light took more than 12 billion years to reach the Earth and scientists can see it as it was when it was. The age of the universe is 1.4 billion years, or only 10 percent of its current age.
This smaller galaxy discovered thanks to the network of radio telescopes (ALMA) in northern Chile is very similar to the Milky Way, as it shares the same density of stars around the center of the galaxy and the rotation of the disk as well.
This discovery came as a surprise to astronomers, who did not believe that such a celestial body could form 12 billion light years ago.
Another major surprise is that no traces of turbulence or instability were recorded in the seemingly quiet smaller galaxy, which leads us to believe that this young cosmic environment was perhaps less chaotic than we think even shortly after the Big Bang.
In turn, Simona Figueti of the German Max Planck Center, one of the authors of the study, explained that “what we discovered is very surprising despite the formation of stars at a high rate and because they are the center of a highly charged pathway that forms (SPT 0418 -47) the best-organized galaxy disk discovered in the newly emerging universe.
