Milky Way look-alike galaxy observed: its characteristic spiral shape, with thick and flattened disks, indicates that both galaxies evolved gradually, and not from violent collisions with smaller objects, forcing astronomers to revise current theories about origin of the Milky Way.
This is demonstrated by the study published in the Astrophyiscal Journal Letters by the astronomers of the Australian University of Sydney, coordinated by Nicholas Scott and Jesse van de Sande.
The double galaxy is called Galaxy UGC 10738, is about 320 million light years from Earth and has been studied thanks to the Very Large Telescope (Vlt) of the Southern European Observatory (Eso), in Chile. "The observations of the double galaxy of the Via Milky Way - explains Scott - indicate that galaxies like ours are very common in the cosmos and that they evolved in a natural way, so to speak, without passing through catastrophic collisions with smaller galaxies ”.