Milky Way lookalike found 12 billion light years away
Peering into the early universe, astronomers uncovered a surprise: a young galaxy that looks a lot like the Milky Way. The newfound galaxy is called SPT0418-47, and given its great distance from Earth, astronomers see the galaxy as it was when the universe was just 1.4 billion years old – roughly 12 billion years before today.
The discovery held a big surprise for the researchers: stars were forming quickly, as expected, since there was abundant gas available when the universe was young. But despite the chaos, SPT0418-47 has a well-defined, rotating disc and galactic ‘bulge’ at the centre. That’s a similar structure to the Milky Way’s today.
Analogies between SPT0418-47 and the
Milky Way are not perfect, however. The Milky Way sports a distinctive barred-spiral shape, formed by large ‘arms’ of stars and gas. But SPT0418-47 lacks such arms. Moreover, scientists expect it will evolve into another galaxy type entirely, an elliptical galaxy.
Yet the newfound galaxy does give insight into the evolution of these massive star-filled structures over the eons. Based on this new find, it appears there may have been less dramatic galaxy changes than previously imagined. “The structures that we observe in nearby spiral galaxies and in our Milky Way were already in place 12 billion years ago,” said Francesca Rizzo, a PhD student from Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics.
It was the powerful Atacama Large Millimeter/ submillimeter Array (ALMA) that allowed astronomers to spy on SPT0418-47. ALMA consists of 66 antennae scattered across the Chilean desert, working together to create one large telescopic lens. The newfound galaxy was too faint to be observed directly, so ALMA used a technique called gravitational lensing to overcome the problem, magnifying SPT0418-47’s light using the gravity of a nearby galaxy.
Gravitational lensing can sometimes produce some distortion, but in this case the alignment between the two galaxies was almost exact. This makes SPT0418-47 appear as a nearly-perfect ring in the raw images. Rizzo and her team found the true shape and gas motion of the galaxy using a computer model.
Future telescopes, such as the European Southern Observatory’s Extremely Large Telescope, will peer further into the early universe to better figure out how common SPT0418-47’s shape was among the galactic
“The newfound galaxy does give insight into the evolution of these massive star-filled structures over the eons”