Behold ‘Big Wheel’: An Unusually Monstrous Galaxy From the Early Universe

Observations by the keen-eyed Webb Space Telescope have revealed a huge galaxy in the distant—which is to say early—universe. The galaxy is a vibrant orange disk, dubbed the Big Wheel. Its life began within the universe’s first two billion years of existence; given the cosmos’ near-14-billion-year existence, that’s quite old. The galaxy is remarkably developed for appearing so early in time, raising new questions about how galaxies form. The team’s research, published this week in Nature Astronomy, captures and explores the eerie beauty of the gargantuan structure. “This galaxy is larger than any other kinematically confirmed disks at similar epochs and is surprisingly similar to today’s largest disks with regard to size and mass,” the team wrote in the paper. “Multiwavelength observations show that it lies in an exceptionally dense environment, where the galaxy number density is more than ten times higher than the cosmic average and mergers are frequent.” In other words, the Big W ... Read full article.