Spiral Galaxies Everywhere

Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 1300 by Hubble Heritage

With the advent of our Age of Artificial Intelligence, the world appears to have descended into a state of funk. Jobs are disappearing, population has begun to collapse in many parts of the world, and wars seem to be breaking out everywhere. People increasingly think that life may not be worth living if they are no different from AI machines; they are overdosing on drugs, or have turned into zombies watching movies and playing video games.

This is a time when humanity needs something to inspire it. Some want renewed focus on the mystery of consciousness, others want a greater effort to understand the physical cosmos.

It is a time of crisis in cosmology. There is no evidence for the postulated dark matter and dark energy that are supposed to constitute 96% of the universe. Then there is the problem of observational data going against the standard theory on how the universe has evolved.

Visualization of the Milky Way Galaxy. NASA/JPL-Caltech

Today, spiral galaxies like our own 13.6-billion-year-old barred spiral Milky Way are common in the cosmos [4]. It was not that long ago that based on a study of 2,000 galaxies from a Hubble Space Telescope census, NASA proclaimed that barred spiral galaxies were “latecomers” to the universe [7]. It had found far fewer Milky Way-like galaxies 7 billion years ago than now that led astronomers to conclude that massive galaxies in the distant past were lumpy, with ill-defined structures. According to standard theory, spiral galaxies emerged only about 6–7 billion years ago.

But new data from the James Webb Space Telescope has revealed that spiral galaxies were not only more common than previously imagined, even the early ones had fully formed spiral arms and disks not unlike what we find in the Milky Way.

CEERS-2112, a barred spiral galaxy, was observed in 2023 by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) [1], and it was dated to when the universe was around 2.1 billion years old. Its mass at 3.9 billion times that of the Sun is comparable with that of the Milky Way.

Many cosmologists are saying that previous notions about galaxy evolution need to be revised. Up until recently, theorists believed a barred galaxy like our Milky Way would require billions of years of evolution for the bars are an aggregation of nearby stars under the force of gravity.

Recently there is was a dramatic finding of the most distant and earliest rotating disk galaxy named REBELS-25 that further challenges theories of galactic evolution [6]. Discovered by a team of astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), it has a redshift of 7.31, and has features similar to those of the Milky Way, and these include an elongated central bar of stars together with features that suggest that it may even possess spiral arms. With the epoch of 700 million years after the Big Bang, this would mean that REBELS-25 is the oldest spiral galaxy ever seen.

If the rotation of galaxies averages say 200–300 km/s, and a full rotation takes say 250 million years, then a galaxy that is 700 million years old has already rotated four times, but this doesn’t appear to be enough time to form spiral arms.

The History of the Universe: Regions for which few measurements have been made, including the Dark Ages before the formation of stars, galaxies, and later planets are shown. Billions of years are indicated by the letter ‘B’ [5]

There’s an out-of-the-box theory according to which filaments and spiral structures are the earliest to have formed in the universe [3]. The central idea is that the birth of the universe is accompanied by an evolution of its dimensionality with the consequence that linear and spiral structures come first. This view also obviates any reason to postulate dark matter and dark energy for in it the currently accelerating expansion of the universe is a consequence of the changing dimensionality [2].

So what should humanity do now? There is a popular saying: “The best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago, and the second best time is now.” We need to think big and put eyes (remote telescopes) on the Moon [5] and, later, on Mars, even though it will take a few years to make it happen.

Unlike telescopes such as the Hubble and the James Webb, which are made from mirrors and lenses, Moon-based observatories will be radio telescopes and some could even be on the radio-quiet far side of the Moon and they would be able to peer farther into the past than any Earth-based telescope.

References

[1] L. Costantin et al. A Milky Way-like barred spiral galaxy at a redshift of 3. Nature (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41586–023–06636-x

[2] S. Kak, Evolutionary stages in a noninteger dimensional universe. Indian Journal of Physics, 97, 3041–3045 (2023). DOI: 10.1007/s12648–023–02653–8

[3] S. Kak, Filaments and spirals in a noninteger dimensional universe. Indian Journal of Physics (2024). DOI:10.1007/s12648–024–03357–3

[4] V. Kuhn et al. JWST Reveals a Surprisingly High Fraction of Galaxies Being Spiral-like at 0.5 ≤ z ≤ 4. The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 968, L15 (2024). DOI: 10.3847/2041–8213/ad43eb

[5] P. McGarey et al., How to Deploy a 10-km Interferometric Radio Telescope on the Moon with Just Four Tethered Robots. 2022 IEEE Aerospace Conference (AERO) (2022). DOI: 10.1109/AERO53065.2022.9843745.

[6] L.E. Rowland et al. REBELS-25: Discovery of a dynamically cold disc galaxy at z = 7.31. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, stae2217 (2024). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stae2217

[7] K. Sheth et al. Evolution of the bar fraction in COSMOS: Quantifying the assembly of the Hubble sequence. The Astrophysical Journal 675 (2008). DOI: 10.1086/524980