Scientists find distant galaxy surprisingly similar to our own – and it is further away than any before - The Independent

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The galaxy is 12 billion light-years away, meaning that our image of it comes from when the universe was relatively young, at just 1.4 billion years old.

As such, it offers a way of looking back at galaxy formation in the early universe, when it was only 10 per cent of its current age.

Galaxies from so early in the universe were expected to be turbulent and unstable, in line with existing theories about galaxy formation.

"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," said co-author Simona Vegetti, also from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics?

The new paper, 'A dynamically cold disk galaxy in the early Universe', is published in Nature today.

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