'Baby' Milky Way discovered 12 bln light years away

A golden halo glinting 12 billion light years away is the farthest galaxy resembling our Milky Way yet spotted, astronomers said Wednesday, adding the "surprisingly unchaotic" infant star system challenges our understanding of the early years of the Universe.

"Despite forming stars at a high rate, and therefore being the site of highly energetic processes, SPT0418-47 is the most well-ordered galaxy disc ever observed in the early Universe," said Vegetti, who co-authored the research published Wednesday in Nature.

"This result is quite unexpected and has important implications for how we think galaxies evolve."

https://www.spacedaily.com/afp/200812150025.s4z3xdhi.html

I saw this a few days ago, and it is very interesting! The article I read said that they expect that the galaxy evolved into an elliptical galaxy instead of a disk galaxy like our Milky Way, though. I haven't read the paper though, so I definitely could be wrong about that.

Still, very interesting to see that galaxy formation occurs much more rapidly than we thought!