Spiral galaxies (the ones with spiral arms) had two major components: the arms themselves, and a central bulge of stars from which the arms appeared to emanate. But they fell into four broad categories: elliptical, spiral, irregular, and peculiar. Once astronomers started mounting cameras on big telescopes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they found that galaxies - which for the most part look like small fuzzy patches to the eye - have a staggering variety of shapes. If you can sort them in some way, you can start to gain insight into them. Instead of being semi-permanent features of galaxies, they may instead actually wind themselves up, disappear, and reform again!Ĭlassification is a natural first step when you have a collection of objects and you're trying to figure them out. The consequences of this are as dramatic as they are cosmic: It implies very strongly that the way we've been thinking about how galaxies form and maintain spiral arms is also wrong. He also contributed to the interpretation of the measurements.Some big news from Galaxy Zoo: It's looking very much like a classic classification scheme for galaxies - first dreamed up by Edwin Hubble himself! - may be, um, wrong.

The discovery of ceers-2112 paves the way for more bars to be discovered in the young universe.'ĭe la Vega helped the research team by estimating the redshift and properties of ceers-2112. This is important because galaxies in the distant past were smaller than they are now, which makes finding bars harder. Second, the discovery of ceers-2112 demonstrates that structures like bars can be detected when the universe was very young. 'These models may need to adjust how much dark matter makes up galaxies in the early universe, as dark matter is believed to affect the rate at which bars form. 'First, theoretical models of galaxy formation and evolution will need to account for some galaxies becoming stable enough to host bars very early in the universe's history,' de la Vega said. The discovery of ceers-2112 is expected to change at least two aspects of astronomy. It was thought that bars could not form or last long in galaxies in the early universe.' 'In the past, when the universe was very young, galaxies were unstable and chaotic. 'In such galaxies, bars can form spontaneously due to instabilities in the spiral structure or gravitational effects from a neighboring galaxy,' de la Vega said. 'The discovery of ceers-2112 shows that it can happen in only a fraction of that time, in about one billion years or less,' de la Vega said.Īccording to him, galactic bars are thought to form in spiral galaxies with stars that rotate in an ordered fashion, the way they do in the Milky Way. 'The bar in ceers-2112 suggests that galaxies matured and became ordered much faster than we previously thought, which means some aspects of our theories of galaxy formation and evolution need revision.'Īstronomers' previous understanding of galaxy evolution was that it took several billion years for galaxies to become ordered enough to develop bars. 'Nearly all bars are found in spiral galaxies,' said de la Vega, who joined UCR last year after receiving his doctoral degree in astronomy at Johns Hopkins University. It is possible to find bars in non-spiral galaxies, he said, but they are very rare. Galactic bars resemble bars in our everyday lives, such as a candy bar. De la Vega explained that a galactic bar is a structure, made of stars, within galaxies. This is surprising because galaxies were much more chaotic in the early universe and very few had similar structures to the Milky Way.'Ĭeers-2112 has a bar in its center. 'Finding ceers-2112 shows that galaxies in the early universe could be as ordered as the Milky Way. 'This galaxy, named ceers-2112, formed soon after the Big Bang,' said coauthor de la Vega, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

The research, published in Nature this week, was led by scientists at the Centro de Astrobiología in Spain. Until now it was believed that barred spiral galaxies like the Milky Way could not be observed before the universe, estimated to be 13.8 billion years old, reached half of its current age.

Barred spiral galaxy examples