James Webb Spots Our Twin at the Dawn of Time

[gortex]

A composite picture using data from both JWST and ALMA has been released showing more detail of our twin at the dawn of time.

In 2023, Huang and his colleagues described a galaxy called J0107a based on data from JWST, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and ALMA. This thing is a beast. It's a beautifully formed grand design spiral galaxy with 450 billion solar masses' worth of stars, positively bursting with star formation at a rate of 500 solar masses per year.

Huang's team wanted to understand the evolution of J0107a, so they used JWST and ALMA observations to try to map the movements of the gas therein. What they found was a shock: the galaxy's bar is shunting gas to the galaxy's center at a rate of around 600 solar masses per year, fueling the high rate of star formation found there.

This star gas flow is occurring in J0107a around 10 to 100 times faster than it does in galaxies we see around us in the local Universe, including the Milky Way. It feeds into the galactic center, increasing in density as it accumulates there. Since stars form from dense knots in thick clouds of gas and dust, the flows do indeed facilitate star birth. This suggests that bars may have been an important driver of galactic growth and evolution earlier than we had thought possible.
https://www.sciencealert.com/early-unive...our-galaxy

Maybe it is the early Milky Way.