Astronomers have spotted the earliest known spiral galaxy, dating to just three billion years after the Big Bang. Theories of galaxy formation held that the Universe was still too chaotic a place to allow such a perfectly formed or "grand-design" spiral to form.
It should take far longer for gravity to bring matter into thin, neat discs. But a team reporting in Nature says the galaxy BX442 got the gravitational "kick" it needed to form a spiral from a smaller "dwarf galaxy" orbiting it.
They first spotted BX442 as the one and only spiral-looking object in a survey of 300 galaxies carried out by the Hubble space telescope, when they were shocked to see what looked to be a spiral galaxy.
TVNL Comment: Nearly half the population of America rejects this science and believes only the word of a book written thousands of years ago. How sad is that?
Time to look up, stargazers – there’s going to be a planetary "kiss" on June 9.You'll...
Brilliant splashes of green, purple and pink will streak the night sky for many stargazers in...
Standing in his laboratory, Harvard professor Sean Eddy gazes at a row of vacant work stations....
Officials are investigating whether a huge fire that destroyed a top marine science laboratory at the...
