Astronomers are redoing the calculations, and the results are very different. An international team of researchers, which included astronomers from the University of Manchester (UK) and the University of Victoria (Canada), discovered that galaxies like Our Milky Way dominates the entire Universe and is surprisingly widespread.
Our Milky Way is a typical “disk” galaxy: its shape is exactly like a disk, it rotates around its center and almost always has spiral arms. It was already known that they are most frequent in the neighboring Universe. However, astronomers believed that these types of galaxies were too fragile to exist in the early Universe. That is, a very long time ago, closer to the origin of the Universe itself.
Well, that’s not entirely true. A team of astronomers using the powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has discovered that These disk galaxies are ten times more common.. This, compared to all observations made so far. These galaxies date back to very ancient times, with many forming 10 billion years ago or more, according to a study published in Astrophysical Journal This week.
“We thought that disk galaxies barely existed until the universe was about six billion years old,” said Christopher Conselis, professor of extragalactic astronomy at the University of Manchester. “These galaxies, like the Milky Way, were forming almost before the beginning of the universe.” In other words, this discovery changes our entire understanding of the formation of structures in the Universe.
What does it mean that there are more galaxies like ours?
“The study completely challenges existing ideas about how scientists think our universe is evolving… New ideas need to be considered,” the University of Manchester said in a statement.
Leonardo Ferreira, lead author of the study and a professor at the University of Victoria, explained that for more than 30 years, it was thought that galaxies like ours were very rare in the early Universe due to the normal violent collisions that galaxies undergo. Until now, it was believed that galaxies mostly have an irregular and peculiar structure, reminiscent of a merger.
These conclusions were based primarily on observations using the Hubble Space Telescope, Webb’s big brother. However, the superior capabilities of the Webb telescope, which has been operating for just over a year, are allowing these new details of the structure of these galaxies to be observed for the first time. “True structure,” insists the new research team.
“Based on our results, astronomers must rethink our understanding of the formation of the first galaxies and how galaxies have evolved over the past 10 billion years.”.
Christopher Conselice is Professor of Extragalactic Astronomy at the University of Manchester.

The fact that galaxies like ours are the most common means that most stars in the universe exist and form within them, say those responsible for the study. These results also provide clues to important aspects of dark matter in the early Universe, about which we know very little.
A 2020 study from the University of Arkansas suggests that galaxies like ours are more likely than any other type of galaxy to reproduce the unique quality that has characterized our Milky Way so far. These are disk galaxies where life is thought to most likely originate.

Source: Hiper Textual
