Astronomers have discovered an extremely distant galaxy using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. The galaxy, named SPT0418-47, is over 12 billion light-years away.

At such astronomical distances, it’s hard for even the best telescopes to see much. But this time, they were helped by gravitational lensing, a prediction of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. A nearer galaxy that was almost exactly in the path converged the light like a gigantic magnifying glass. The image was distorted into a ring, but the astronomers could work out many details of its shape.

They were very surprised to find that SPT0418-47 had a rotating disc and a bulge, just like our own Milky Way galaxy, although without the spiral arms. The surprise resulted from their long-age cosmology—that is, we are seeing it only 1.4 billion years after the alleged big bang. But such ordering was “contradicting theories that all galaxies in the early Universe were turbulent and unstable.”

This is hardly the first example of an orderly galaxy. Previously, we reported on the discovery of over 300 mature galaxies ‘dated’ to 3–6 billion years after the big bang (creation.com/galaxy-games). This surprised the theorists, who didn’t expect to find any massive galaxies over 9 billion light-years away. The newest discovery also “raises many questions on how a well-ordered galaxy could have formed so soon after the Big Bang.”

• European Southern Observatory, ALMA sees most distant Milky Way look-alike; eso.org, 12 Aug 2020.
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• Rizzo, F. and 6 others, A dynamically cold disk galaxy in the early Universe, Nature 584(7820):201–204, 12 Aug 2020.