Astronomers have discovered the most distant example of a galaxy in the universe that looks like our home galaxy, the Milky Way.
When the universe was just two billion years old, the newfound spiral galaxy, ceers-2112, appears to have featured a bar of stars and gas cutting across its heart, like a slash across a no-smoking sign. The Milky Way, also a spiral galaxy, sports a similar bar. Scientists suspect the Milky Way's bar rotates cylindrically, like a toilet roll holder does as you unravel toilet paper, funneling gas into the galaxy's center and sparking bursts of star formation.
