Planetary Landscapes

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, an international team has stumbled across a colossal spiral galaxy nicknamed "Big Wheel." It is five times more massive than our Milky Way and twice as wide, yet it existed when the universe was only 2 billion years old… https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=1561102015663394&set=a.252568479850094

Astronomers have just found a galaxy that should not exist this early in the universe.

🌌 Using the James Webb Space Telescope, an international team has stumbled across a colossal spiral galaxy nicknamed "Big Wheel." It is five times more massive than our Milky Way and twice as wide, yet it existed when the universe was only 2 billion years old.

The galaxy, led to publication by Weichen Wang at the University of Milano-Bicocca, was discovered by accident while JWST was imaging a distant quasar. Spanning around 100,000 light years, it is three times larger than current cosmological simulations predict possible at that epoch.

Caltech's Chuck Steidel compared it to finding a live dinosaur. Big Wheel sits in an unusually dense patch of the early universe, packed with young galaxies that will one day merge into a cluster. That crowded environment may have fast-tracked its growth.

It is a galaxy that grew up far too quickly, in a place far too young to allow it.

📄 RESEARCH PAPER
📌 Wang et al, "A Giant Disk Galaxy Two Billion Years After the Big Bang", Nature Astronomy (2025)

Infrared mosaic image of NGC 1333, an active star-forming cluster in the Perseus molecular cloud located approximately 960 light-years away. James Webb's infrared capabilities allow astronomers to peer through dusty veils to reveal newborn stars, brown dwarfs, and planetary mass objects in this young cluster. Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Scholz, K. Muzic, A. Langeveld, R. Jayawardhana.

Venus and Saturn from Spain… Credit: Marina Prol.
https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=997557222972855&set=a.996452506416660

Credit: Marina Prol
Spain