Our universe is so unfathomably large that it’s no surprise that it’s still full of secrets and mysteries – regardless of how unfathomably large an amount of cash and brainpower we pump into trying to understand it.

So it follows that regularly, space scientists discover brand new things about the universe that surprise them and bring the current field of knowledge and understanding into question.

This is exactly what happened when researchers Rashi Jain and Yogesh Wadadekar were using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope recently, as they spotted a very old galaxy that resembled the Milky Way.

But what really surprised them was the location of the galaxy, which was situated somewhere where present knowledge of space would dictate that it really shouldn’t be.

In their findings, which were recently published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, the researchers explained that the galaxy – which they named Alaknanda – was old. In fact, the maturity of the galaxy told them that it formed only around 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang.

1.5 billion years sounds like a long time, but in space terms it’s nothing.

The reason that’s so surprising? Well, as Jain explains in a statement, science had previously thought this was impossible, since spiral-shaped galaxies were thought to have taken billions of years to form:

“Alaknanda has the structural maturity we associate with galaxies that are billions of years older. Finding such a well-organised spiral disk at this epoch tells us that the physical processes driving galaxy formation—gas accretion, disk settling, and possibly the development of spiral density waves—can operate far more efficiently than current models predict. It’s forcing us to rethink our theoretical framework.”

This is highly significant, since it tells us that the universe did not behave in the ways that astronomers have long-believed in its early days, as Wadadekar continued:

“Alaknanda reveals that the early Universe was capable of far more rapid galaxy assembly than we anticipated. Somehow, this galaxy managed to pull together ten billion solar masses of stars and organise them into a beautiful spiral disk in just a few hundred million years. That’s extraordinarily fast by cosmic standards, and it compels astronomers to rethink how galaxies form.”

The new findings truly shifts the goalposts when it comes to understanding the early days of the universe and how galaxies and their planets – including our home planet – formed over time, and where those building blocks for life came from.

Far from frustrating this is a new challenge as we move toward truly understanding what came before us.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about why we should be worried about the leak in the bottom of the ocean.