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Astronomers “shocked” by earliest known spiral galaxy

Denyse O'Leary
July 19, 2012
Cosmology, News
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From “First spiral galaxy in early Universe stuns astronomers” (BBC News, 19 July 2012), we learn “Astronomers have spotted the earliest known spiral galaxy, dating to just three billion years after the Big Bang”:

Theories of galaxy formation held that the Universe was still too chaotic a place to allow such a perfectly formed or “grand-design” spiral to form.

It should take far longer for gravity to bring matter into thin, neat discs.

But a team reporting in Nature says the galaxy BX442 got the gravitational “kick” it needed to form a spiral from a smaller “dwarf galaxy” orbiting it.

They first spotted BX442 as the one and only spiral-looking object in a survey of 300 galaxies carried out by the Hubble space telescope, when they were shocked to see what looked to be a spiral galaxy.

Here at UD News, we have developed a little macro for “earlier than thought.” Because we hear it so often.

Comments
Yes, cosmic darwinists are cousins of normal darwinist. They argument "ex post facto", inventing "ad hoc" explanations, except when they are in his bussines. For example they deny the new testament (among other things) because the prophecies fulfilled from the old testament are, yes, "ex post facto". creatoblepas
creatoblepas, Exactly. In fact, this is merely a mundane application of what we knew all along. Just like we predicted that there wouldn't be much junk DNA because natural selection is so good at weeding out useless stuff. Or was it that we predicted that evolution would need lots of junk DNA to work with? I forget. But whatever it was, evolution clearly predicted it and therefore was confirmed to be right. Collin
Better theory: random chance did it. Yes, it´s an empirical fact that galaxies like it popped into existence from a fluctuation due to dark matter + dark energy + Higgs particles from a vacuum of nothing-something. Exactly that is predicted by cosmic evolution. creatoblepas
ID was there first! Mung

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