NASA's James Webb telescope spotted the most distant galaxy in the universe that looks like ours

The latest discovery could upheave our models of the universe and how dark matter influenced galaxy formation in its early days.

• The James Webb Space Telescope spotted a twin of the Milky Way in the depths of the universe. 
• The galaxy formed shortly after the Big Bang, which was thought to be impossible. 
• This could mean there's a missing ingredient in our models of how the universe formed. 

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has spotted the most distant example of a galaxy in the universe that looks similar to the Milky Way.

The galaxy, named ceers-2112, is more than 11.7 billion years old and is the earliest example of a barred spiral galaxy ever seen.

Astronomers were surprised to see it because cosmic models suggest barred spiral galaxies only started emerging around 6.9 billion years after the Big Bang.

The latest discovery, published in the journal Nature, could upheave our models of the universe and how dark matter influenced galaxy formation in its early days, study authors said.

A barred spiral galaxy exists in the universe's infancy

With its advanced imaging capabilities, JWST has allowed us to peer into the early universe with more precision than ever before.

The latest study is no exception. To a layperson, the picture below may look like little more than a colorful blob — and when looking at information coming from the early days of the universe, that's the kind of image that we're usually working with.

But with JWST's precise measurement instruments, scientists were able to squeeze out crucial information about ceers-2112's characteristics. For them, there is little doubt: this picture suggests this is a barred spiral galaxy.

But this galaxy is in redshift 3, a technical term suggesting it appeared about 2 billion years after the birth of the universe

That's a conundrum, as a barred spiral galaxy is a very tall order for such a young universe.

Previous models had suggested such complex galaxies would take at least a few billion years to evolve. Scientists had thought you couldn't find a barred spiral galaxy before the universe was about 6.9 billion years old.

"The discovery of ceers-2112 shows that it can happen in only a fraction of that time, in about one billion years or less," Alexander de la Vega, a physicist and cosmologist at the University of California, Riverside, said in a press release accompanying the findings.

"It is the first publication that finds in the childhood of the universe these spiral galaxies that have a disk with a central bar," Yetli Rosas Guevara, an astrophysicist of the Spanish Donostia International Physics Center who was not involved in the study, told El País.

The findings could shed light on the early days of dark matter

The new finding suggests something is wrong with models predicting what was happening in the early days of the universe.

"In the past, when the universe was very young, galaxies were unstable and chaotic. It was thought that bars could not form or last long in galaxies in the early universe," de la Vega said.

Simulations "really struggle to reproduce such systems at those epochs," Luca Costantin, study lead author and astrophysicist at the Centro de Astrobiología in Madrid, told Space.com.

"We now need to understand which key physical ingredient is missing in our models — if something is missing," Costantin told Space.com.

One factor that doesn't quite align is the role of dark matter in the early days of galaxy formation.

As a reminder, the stuff that makes up everyone on Earth, our planet, our galaxy, and everything we can observe, is ordinary matter, or baryon. But physicists think baryon makes up only 5% of our universe. The other 95% — about 27% of dark matter and 68% of dark energy — remain huge mysteries in physics.

Some models suggest there was an "over-abundance" of dark matter in the early days of the universe, study co-author Jairo Abreu, a researcher at the University of La Laguna, told Space.com.

But that doesn't quite make sense with the latest findings: barred spiral galaxies are more likely to be made up of baryon, said Abreu.

This suggests that "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," said de la Vega.