Astronomers have spotted the oldest disk galaxy they’ve ever seen. Shaped like a pancake, it’s been around for billions of years. In fact, this galaxy got its flat shape a mere 1.5 billion years after the universe was born.

That’s far earlier than astronomers had expected.

The universe was born as a single point in what is known as the Big Bang. It then stretched like an inflated balloon. Scientists think the Big Bang happened about 13.8 billion years ago. A little more than a billion years later, there’s this pancake galaxy.

Scientists had thought the type of pancake galaxy just seen would not develop for at least 3 billion to 4 billion years after the Big Bang.

This galaxy is disk-shaped, just like the Milky Way galaxy in which we live. Our galaxy has spiral arms. The old galaxy may have those too. That’s important to note. It means that the old disk galaxy formed its pancake shape and spiral structure pretty quickly after the Big Bang. It suggests galaxies like the Milky Way can grow up relatively quickly, astronomers now say.

Marcel Neeleman works at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. He headed a team of astronomers that reported the new find May 21 in Nature.

Such an old disk galaxy “challenges the accepted paradigm [PAIR-uh-dyme] for how disk galaxies form and evolve in the universe,” says Rachel Somerville. She is an astrophysicist and works at the Flatiron Institute in New York City. She was not involved with the new study.

The accepted idea had been that the earliest galaxies probably where not flat but shaped like a ball. The galaxies were made with the help of dark matter. That’s invisible stuff in the universe. We don’t know what it is yet. Still, dark matter has mass. So it could pull in surrounding gas and dust to make stars.

Explainer: What is a computer model?

As more material got pulled in, galaxies that were round and blobby emerged. At least, that’s what astronomers had observed before. It’s also what computer models suggest. Theory had suggested that creating those early galaxies was a violent process. Gas got scrambled and heated. Hot gas expands. That should make the early galaxies spherical blobs. They were too hot for the gas to settle into a disk. Only when that gas had lots and lots of time to cool off should it collapse into bright, starry disk galaxies.

Oldest, Most Distant Disk Galaxy Found 12.3 Billion Light Years Away

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Astronomers have discovered the oldest and farthest disk galaxy ever that is challenging the current understanding of how galaxies were formed in the early universe. So far, the studies have found that these massive systems, consisting of stars, gases, and dust, took their shape slowly and gradually over billions of years because at the beginning of the universe, a galaxy evolved…

Oldest, Most Distant Disk Galaxy Found 12.3 Billion Light Years Away

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Astronomers have discovered the oldest and farthest disk galaxy ever that is challenging the current understanding of how galaxies were formed in the early universe. So far, the studies have found that these massive systems, consisting of stars, gases, and dust, took their shape slowly and gradually over billions of years because at the beginning of the universe, a galaxy evolved…

Top image: The galaxy cluster SDSS J1110+6459 is located about 6 billion light-years from Earth and contains hundreds of galaxies. At left, a distinctive blue arc is actually composed of three separate images of a more distant background galaxy called SGAS J111020.0+645950.8. The background galaxy has been magnified, distorted, and multiply imaged by the gravity of the galaxy cluster in a process known as gravitational lensing. Credits: NASA, ESA, and T. Johnson (University of Michigan)

Bottom image: In this Hubble photograph of a distant galaxy cluster, a spotty blue arc stands out against a background of red galaxies. That arc is actually three separate images of the same background galaxy. The background galaxy has been gravitationally lensed, its light magnified and distorted by the intervening galaxy cluster. On the right: How the galaxy would look to Hubble without distortions. Credits: NASA, ESA, and T. Johnson (University of Michigan)

(ESA/Hubble)  Hubble Pushed Beyond Limits to Spot Clumps of New Stars in Distant Galaxy

(...) By applying a new computational analysis to a galaxy magnified by a gravitational lens, astronomers have obtained images 10 times sharper than what Hubble could achieve on its own. The results show an edge-on disk galaxy studded with brilliant patches of newly formed stars.

The galaxy in question is so far away that we see it as it appeared 11 billion years ago, only 2.7 billion years after the big bang. It is one of more than 70 strongly lensed galaxies studied by the Hubble Space Telescope, following up targets selected by the Sloan Giant Arcs Survey, which discovered hundreds of strongly lensed galaxies by searching Sloan Digital Sky Survey imaging data covering one-fourth of the sky.

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