First spiral galaxy stuns astronomers

Astronomers have dappled the first known spiral galaxy, dating to just three billion years after the Big Bang. They first speckled BX442 as the one and only spiral-looking object in a study of 300 galaxies carried out by the Hubble space telescope, when they were shocked to see what looked to be a spiral galaxy. Those observations confirmed a hint apparent in the Hubble data: that BX442 was being orbited by a smaller dwarf galaxy at its edges.

To get a closer look at BX442, the team went on to use the OH-Suppressing Infrared Integral Field Spectrograph at the Keck observatory in Hawaii which can take away the effect of all the water that lies between the Earth and galaxies at such astronomical distances. The observations confirmed a hint apparent in the Hubble data: that BX442 was being orbited by a lesser dwarf galaxy at its edges.

Astronomers say they've found oldest galaxy so far

Astronomers think they've found the oldest thing they've ever seen in the cosmos: It's a galaxy far, far absent from a time long, long ago.

Buried in a Hubble Space Telescope photo released former this year is a small smudge of light that European astronomers now calculate is a galaxy from 13.1 billion years ago. That's a time when the world was very young, just shy of 600 million years old. That would make it the initial and most distant galaxy see so far.

Through now the galaxy is so ancient it probably doesn't exist in its previous form and has already complex into bigger neighbors, said WASHINGTON Matthew Lehnert of the Paris Observatory, lead author of the study in print online Wednesday in the journal Nature.

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