Chethma De Mel, Jadetimes Staff
C. J. De Mel is a Jadetimes news reporter covering Entertainment News
One of the most remarkable findings in astronomy has been the revelation of a galaxy, known as REBELS-25, which seems to be a virtual twin of the Milky Way. But the amazing thing is that we see it as it was just 700 million years after the Big Bang, and that raises the question of how it could have evolved so fast. The findings-most recently described by a team of astronomers at the European Southern Observatory in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society-run counter to current theories of how galaxies come into being.
The redshift value of 7.31 is a measure astronomers use to estimate how fast galaxies are moving away from us; it puts REBELS-25 at an incredible distance. For the scientists, the rather high value in redshift puts REBELS-25 within a Universe very young, yet already with the characteristic disk shape and spiral structure present in mature galaxies like the Milky Way. Such development in a young galaxy does puzzle the scientists.
Such galaxies as the Milky Way are billions of years old. In the early days of such galaxies, they were supposed to be irregular, with chaotic motion of stars. Eventually, those would go through mergers and a very gradual evolution to form the spiral disk feature familiar today.
REBELS-25 seemingly bypassed this long evolution process. Though extremely young, it does look astonishingly like the Milky Way today. It may provide an answer to whether our existing theory of the formation of galaxies is complete. If REBELS-25 has evolved so quickly, then there might be some very fundamental aspects of cosmic development that we haven't discovered yet. Further investigation will be required to fathom how such a galaxy could have formed so quickly in the early Universe, and this may necessitate modifications in our theory about galaxy evolution.
