Daniel CleryAstronomers imagine the early universe as a wild and lawless place, with chaotic fledgling galaxies full of swirling gases and frantic star formation.
So an image released today comes as a surprise: a young galaxy, spied when the universe was just 10% of its current age, that looks remarkably like our calm and well-ordered Milky Way.It’s not easy to make out galactic features across 12 billion light-years of space.
That’s even true for the supersensitive Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), 66 radio telescopes high in the Chilean Andes that work together as a single instrument.
But a team of astronomers used archival data gathered by ALMA in 2017 to take a look at a distant galaxy called SPT–SJ041839–4751.9, or.