Galaxies from the early Universe are more like our own Milky Way than previously thought, flipping the entire narrative of how scientists think about structure formation in the Universe, according to new research published today.
Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international team of researchers including those at The University of Manchester and University of Victoria in Canada discovered that galaxies like our own Milky Way dominate throughout the universe and are surprisingly common.
These galaxies go far back in the Universe's history with many of these galaxies forming 10 billion years ago or longer.
The Milky Way is a typical 'disk' galaxy, which a shape similar to a pancake or compact disk, rotating about its centre and often containing spiral arms. These galaxies are thought to be the most common in the nearby Universe and might be the types of galaxies where life can develop given the nature of their formation history.
However, astronomers previously considered that these types of galaxies were too fragile to exist in the early Universe when galaxy mergers were more common, destroying what we thought was their delicate shapes.
The new discovery, published today in the Astrophysical Journal, finds that these 'disk' galaxies are ten times more common than what astronomers believed based on previous observations with the Hubble Space Telescope.
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