Milky-way's long lost sibling? SPT0418-47

Gravitationally Lensed view of SPT0418-47.
Image taken from www.eso.org
Credit:ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), Rizzo et al.

SPT0418-47, this is the "catchy" name given to the above galaxy. Located about 12 billion light years away from us this galaxy seems to be very similar to ours. I know that we do not have any direct images of the Milky-way galaxy, for that we will have to go outside our galaxy at a fair distance and then take a picture, I'm sure that is not possible for the foreseeable future. But we know that it is a spiral galaxy and we have pictures of many other such galaxies for reference. 

Reconstructed view of SPT0418-47.
Image taken from www.eso.org
Credit:ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), Rizzo et al.

At first glance it looks nothing like a typical spiral galaxy like ours. It is disc shaped but there are no beautiful spiral arms like the ones we see in images from the hubble telescope. So what makes this galaxy so simlar to ours? Well at this stage it may not look like it but it may have resemblance to a young milky-way. Such rotating disc shaped galaxies have been discovered before and some are even older than this one but the most remarkable thing about this galaxy is that in addition to having a similar mass to our galaxy it also has a galactic bulge, which is caused due to a concentration of stars at the center of galaxies. This is the oldest galaxy discovered so far with a galactic bulge and that is remarkable because it means that galaxies had started to develop galactic bulges when the universe was relatively young. 

We have to remember that this is what the galaxy looked like 12 billion years ago and since then this galaxy will have evolved and changed quite considerably. So studying such galaxies and others that are at different stages we can gather valuable information about the early life of our own galaxy and how it evolved. Once the James Webb Space Telescope is finally launched I'm sure it will make much more valuable discoveries and will help to improve our understanding even further.

I would really appreciate your feedback in the comments section below as it will improve my understanding and help me improve this blog greatly, thank you


Faraz Gill 

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