Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is estimated to be 13.6 billion years old. It began to form a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, but its distinctive spiral arms and general structure took many billions of years to assemble. So, imagine astronomers' surprise when they looked at a JWST image and found a spiral galaxy like the Milky Way already well-formed just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

The object was discovered by Rashi Jain and Yogesh Wadadekar National Centre for Radio Astrophysics of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (NCRA-TIFR) using JWST . They called it Alaknanda, after the Himalayan river that is a twin headstream of the Ganga alongside the Mandakini .

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