A radio telescope located in Chile has captured images of an ancient world that breaks all records and challenges existing theories of cosmic evolution.
A team of scientists led by Dr. Lucie Rowland from Leiden University (Netherlands) has identified a galaxy with a structure similar to that of the Milky Way, where Earth resides. However, the astonishing fact is that this world existed over 13 billion years ago.
The newly identified galaxy is named REBELS-25, which is the most distant, earliest, and strongest rotating disk galaxy ever discovered.
The images of it were captured by ALMA, a powerful network of radio telescopes located in the Atacama Desert of Chile.
The REBELS-25 galaxy appears like a “parallel world”, very similar to the Milky Way – (Photo: ALMA/ESO).
The light that forms the image of this distant world takes a corresponding amount of time to reach Earth, so seeing this galaxy located 13.1 billion light-years away means looking back 13.1 billion years into the past.
This is shocking because the structure of a rotating disk galaxy with “arms” closely resembles the spiral branches of the Milky Way.
“According to our understanding of galaxy formation, we predict that most early galaxies were small and chaotic,” Dr. Jacqueline Hodge, a member of the research team, stated.
Today, spiral galaxies like the Milky Way are very common, but scientists previously believed it would take a significant amount of time and evolutionary processes to develop such complex structures.
Our Milky Way is thought to have also begun its life as a small, simple galaxy.
After numerous mergers that significantly transformed its structure and allowed the galaxy to grow, it eventually achieved its stunning and colossal shape as a “monster” after 13.6 billion years.
Thus, the fact that REBELS-25 is so ancient appearing like a “parallel world”, a near-complete version from such an unreasonable time frame, may compel scientists to revisit and revise many long-standing theories.
Before REBELS-25, the record for the oldest rotating galaxy was cheers-2112, which was observed by the James Webb Space Telescope when the universe was about 2.1 billion years old.
And these are not rare examples showing that humanity may have misconceptions about the early universe.
In recent years, with the “involvement” of the James Webb Space Telescope, scientists have observed many objects belonging to the universe from the first few billion years post-Big Bang.
Many times, they have been astonished to witness galaxies, massive black holes, and a myriad of other surprising phenomena, suggesting that the early universe may have evolved much faster than humanity has previously assumed.
