Big Wheel Dinosaur Spiral Galaxy Biggest Webb
Astronomers just spotted a huge spiral galaxy using James Webb Space Telescope data that they’re nicknaming a “Big Wheel’ because it’s so big and comes from way back in time. This galaxy is about five times heavier than our Milky Way and covers an area twice as wide, making it one of the biggest spiral galaxies they’ve ever seen in the distant universe.


Big Wheel Dinosaur Spiral Galaxy Biggest Webb
What’s really neat is that it was around just two billion years after the Big Bang, which is super early in the universe’s story for something this massive to show up. Charles Steidel, an astronomy professor at Caltech, called it “spectacular” since finding a giant spiral galaxy from that long ago is something no one’s done before. He said it’s like finding a real dinosaur alive today—something so old and huge that shouldn’t still be around looking the way it did. Scientists figure this galaxy probably lost its gas over time, maybe pulled away by space forces, so it wouldn’t look the same now.

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Before this find, people thought that flat, round galaxies from the early universe were a lot smaller. (These flat galaxies, called disk galaxies, include spirals like the one we found, plus others that are circular but don’t have spiral arms.) Big Wheel is about three times bigger than any other galaxies with the same weight from that same time in space history. It’s also at least three times larger than what today’s space computer models guessed it would be, strething 100,000 light-years across from one side to the other.

Exceptionally dense environments such as the one hosting the Big Wheel are still a relatively unexplored territory. Further targeted observations are needed to build a statistical sample of giant disks in the early universe and thus open a new window on the early stages of galaxy formation,” said Sebastiano Cantalupo, co-author of the paper from University of Milano-Bicocca.

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