Latest update:05 December 2025 at 08:18 IST

Professor Wadkar said that the size of this galaxy is one-third the size of the Milky Way, and contains 10 billion stars.

The distant galaxy is 12 billion light-years away from us. (NASA/ESA/CSA)

In a major breakthrough for Indian astronomy, scientists have discovered a massive galaxy that existed when the universe was just 1.5 billion years old, challenging current ideas about how galaxies formed so soon after the Big Bang.

Since the universe is about 13.8 billion years old, this means we are seeing a galaxy from approximately 12 billion years ago, when the universe was only a tenth of its current age.

According to scientists, it was found that galaxies that formed very early were mostly irregular in shape and chaotic.

But when researchers Rashi Jain and Yogesh Wadekar used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to look into the universe’s early past, they observed a “fully formed spiral galaxy — a huge, beautifully organized cosmic wheel.”

Their research was published in the leading European journal Astronomy and Astrophysics in November.

“The galaxy looks remarkably similar to our Milky Way, even though it existed when the universe was only 10% of its current age,” Professor Wadekar said, adding that they named it Alaknanda after a river in the Himalayas.

The BBC reported that Jain, a doctoral researcher at the Pune-based National Center for Radio Astrophysics of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (NCRA-TIFR), discovered the galaxy that was observed earlier this year.

Jane said she was “very excited” when she spotted the galaxy while sifting through data and images from GEMS Webb, the $10 billion telescope launched jointly by the US, European and Canadian space agencies in 2021.

“I was looking at the details of 70,000 objects, and there was only one object that was a spiral galaxy with a large design, about 30,000 light-years in diameter,” she said.

In simple terms, the galaxy had two identical arms extending from a central disk and curving around a bright core, she explained.

“We can see the typical ‘beads on a string’ pattern that resembles clusters of stars along the spiral arms, similar to what we see in nearby spiral galaxies today.”

When she shared the results with her supervisor, Professor Wadekar, he was initially in disbelief. He told the BBC: “It is amazing how such a large galaxy with spiral arms could exist only 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang.”

“This galaxy had to collect 10 billion solar masses of stars and simultaneously form a large disk with spiral arms in just a few hundred million years. This is incredibly fast by cosmic standards,” he said.

Professor Wadkar said that the size of this galaxy is one-third the size of the Milky Way, and contains 10 billion stars.

He added: “But this galaxy is a different beast. It is huge, one-third the size of the Milky Way, and contains 10 billion stars. The galaxy is forming new stars at a rate about 20 to 30 times faster than the current rate of star formation in our Milky Way Galaxy.”

In recent years, the Webb Telescope has detected more complex structures, including spiral galaxies, and this new discovery adds to growing evidence that the early universe was much more advanced than previously thought.

“This galaxy shows that the universe was much more mature early on, and that complex structures were built in our universe much earlier than we thought possible,” Jain said.

Click here to add News18 as your favorite news source on Google.