Indian astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have discovered one of the most distant spiral galaxies ever observed—a massive, beautifully structured cosmic pinwheel that existed when the Universe was only 1.5 billion years old. Named Alaknanda after a Himalayan river, this grand-design spiral galaxy challenges our understanding of how quickly complex galactic structures could form in the early Universe.
The discovery, reported by researchers Rashi Jain and Yogesh Wadadekar at the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (NCRA-TIFR) in Pune, India, reveals a galaxy that looks remarkably similar to our own Milky Way, despite being present when the Universe was only 10% of its current age. The research has been published in the leading European astronomy journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
The researchers chose the name Alaknanda—a Himalayan river that is one of the two main headstreams of the river Ganga— for a specific reason. Alaknanda is a spiral galaxy located about 12 billion light-years away and has a prominent grand design spiral structure just like our own galaxy — the Milky Way.
What makes Alaknanda particularly striking is its textbook spiral structure. The galaxy displays two well-defined spiral arms wrapping around a bright central bulge, spanning approximately 30,000 light-years in diameter. In the galaxy’s ultraviolet light—actually observed in infrared wavelengths due to its extreme distance—astronomers can see the characteristic “beads-on- a-string” pattern of star-forming regions along the spiral arms, similar to what we observe in nearby spiral galaxies today.
Too Perfect, Too Soon?
Before JWST, astronomers believed that galaxies in the early Universe should be chaotic and clumpy, with stable spiral structures only emerging when the cosmos was several billion years old. The predominant theory suggested that early galaxies were “hot” and turbulent, requiring time to cool down and settle into well-formed rotation-dominated disks capable of maintaining
spiral patterns.
The discovery of Alaknanda adds to a growing body of evidence from JWST that the early Universe was more mature than previously thought. Several disk galaxies have been found at similar distances, contrary to what most models from the pre-JWST era predicted. Alaknanda stands out the clearest example of a disk galaxy with well-defined spiral arms at such a high redshift.
