Astronomers have spotted an extremely distant galaxy that looks "surprisingly" like the Milky Way.
The galaxy, named SPT0418-47, looks as it was when the Universe was just 1.4 billion years old, just 10% of its current age, the Independent reports.
This is because it took more than 12 billion years for the light from this faraway galaxy to reach Earth.
Galaxies from so early in the universe were expected to be turbulent and unstable, in line with existing theories about galaxy formation. But the newly-discovered one was not nearly as chaotic as predicted.
That surprising discover could, in turn, lead to a new understanding of how galaxies form and what processes could have been happening in the early universe.
According to the researchers, the findings, published in the journal Nature, suggest that this galaxy is “surprisingly unchaotic, contradicting theories that all galaxies in the early Universe were turbulent and unstable.”
When the researchers looked at the newly-discovered galaxy, they saw that it had features that are characteristic of our own Milky Way. It had a rotating disc and a large group of stars around its middle, which scientists refer to as a “bulge,” and which has never been seen before so early in the universe.
Study co-author Simona Vegetti, from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany, said “What we found was quite puzzling; despite forming stars at a high rate, and therefore being the site of highly energetic processes, SPT0418-47 is the most well-ordered galaxy disc ever observed in the early Universe.
"This result is quite unexpected and has important implications for how we think galaxies evolve."
Co-author Filippo Fraternali, from the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, University of Groningen in the Netherlands, added: "The big surprise was to find that this galaxy is actually quite similar to nearby galaxies, contrary to all expectations from the models and previous, less detailed, observations."
The galaxy is so far away that it is difficult to see even with the most powerful telescopes ever created. But the team were able to examine it by using an effect called gravitational lensing, where the universe itself acts as a magnifying glass and allows scientists to see deep into the universe.
Scientists now hope to conduct further observations to understand how typical such very young but very similar galaxies might be, elsewhere in the early universe.
