Spiral galaxies are significant on Earth. Our solar system is located in one of the Milky Way's spiral arms. It's time to get home. The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA telescope in Chile, has added a new chapter to the history of spiral galaxies.
Significance of Spiral Morphology
BRI 1335-0417, a galaxy that dates back 12.4 billion years, was studied by ALMA. This makes it "the most ancient galaxy of its kind ever observed." at just 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang.
Office Access Government said our own galaxy, the Milky Way, has a spiral shape as well. This means that in the middle, known as the 'bulge,' there is a circle of stars, while the two arms are a scattering of other stars and planets.
"I was excited because I had never seen such clear evidence of a rotating disk, spiral structure, and centralized mass structure in a distant galaxy in any previous literature," said Takafumi Tsukui, lead author of a paper on the galaxy published in the journal Science last week, in an ALMA statement.
Spiral galaxies are very widespread in the universe today, but as scholars reach further farther in time, they've seen proportionally less of them. This raises an important question: when did spiral galaxies first appear? BRI 1335-0417 contributes to the solution, but it raises further questions about how it acquired its distinctive spiral shape so long ago.
Our own Milky Way didn't begin with the pinwheel formation we see today. According to NASA, scientists used Hubble Space Telescope evidence to conclude that the Milky Way started off as a "faint, blue, low-mass object containing lots of gas." The spiral arms' past is still being researched.
'Clear Evidence' for the First Time, Ever
Since it's difficult to study our own galaxy when we're in the middle of it, we can learn about our own history by looking at other galaxies.
According to the researchers, a galactic collision with another, the smaller galaxy may have given galaxy BRI 1335-0417 a head start on its spiral arms.
Satoru Iguchi, a researcher at SOKENDAI and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, said our Solar System is located in one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way.
"Tracing the roots of spiral structure will provide us with clues as to the environment in which the solar system was born," Iguchi said per the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. "I hope that this research will further advance our understanding of the formation history of galaxies."
BRI 1335-0417 has a combined mass of stars and interstellar matter that is approximately equal to that of the Milky Way.
Despite its small size, the researchers concluded per Live Science that it contains the same mass as the Milky Way and that its spiral arms were likely hotspots for star formation. According to the researchers, the galaxy's density could be due to a violent merger between two smaller galaxies.
Experts published the study, titled "Spiral Morphology in an Intensely Star-Forming Disk Galaxy More Than 12 Billion Years Ago," in the journal Science.
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