When astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to peer deep into the early universe, they made a serendipitous discovery: a galaxy that appears to be the Milky Way's ancient twin sibling waving its spiral arms back at us.
In new images that capture light emitted just 1 billion years after the Big Bang, when the universe was roughly one-fourteenth its current age, the newly discovered galaxy appears fully formed, with a central bulge of old stars, a vibrant disk of stellar newborns, and two distinct spiral arms. Given its recognizable features and impressive size, the researchers have dubbed this galaxy the most distant Milky Way "twin" ever observed.
