Incredibly Old Spiral Galaxy Found

Astronomers have found a spiral galaxy that formed much earlier than astronomers thought possible, a find that could lead to insights into how galaxies like our Milky Way evolved from more chaotic and disc-like structures into grand spirals.

In the journal Nature, a team led by University of Toronto researcher David Law described Wednesday how they examined this galaxy, dubbed BX442, from an observatory on top of Hawaii's dormant Mauna Kea volcano.

The astronomers' observations are a snapshot of the galaxy's distant past, since the light has been traveling to Earth for nearly 11 billion years.

What they saw was a galaxy much larger than most others that existed at that time in the universe (about 3 billion years after the Big Bang). BX442's spiral shape also made it stand out from the rest.

"As you go back in time to the early universe, galaxies look really strange, clumpy and irregular, not symmetric," co-author and UCLA professor Alice Shapley said in a statement Wednesday.

"The vast majority of old galaxies look like train wrecks. Our first thought was, why is this one so different, and so beautiful?"

The authors think that BX442 may have been twisted into a spiral thanks to gravitational interactions with a nearby dwarf galaxy.