Astronomers have spotted the earliest barred spiral galaxy yet. It is the same type of galaxy as our Milky Way, but it dates back to when the universe was just 2 billion years old, earlier than was thought possible.
Such galaxies have a distinctive bar-shaped structure in their centre made of stars, from which spiral arms stretch out.
About two-thirds of all spiral galaxies, including the Milky Way, have a prominent stellar bar filled with infant stars. Cosmic formation models have suggested that these galaxies only started forming some 4 billion years after the big bang. Now, Luca Costantin at the Spanish Astrobiology Centre and his colleagues have found an even older one.
But it does work in theory because a scientific paper says that it’s possible the universe is 26.7 billion years old not 13.4 as was previously thought