Cosmic puzzle

India’s scientific community has quietly handed the world one of its most intriguing puzzles: a massive, elegantly structured spiral galaxy that existed when the universe was barely 1.5 billion years old.

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It is called Alaknanda after the Himalayan river, but its significance runs far deeper than its poetic name.

This object, discovered by researchers Rashi Jain and Yogesh Wadadekar using data from the James Webb Space Telescope, forces us to rethink long-held assumptions about how and how quickly the early universe organised itself.

For decades, the prevailing view of the “cosmic dawn” placed it in a state of restless disorder. Astronomers believed that early galaxies were small, turbulent, and misshapen, struggling to gather enough mass to form stable structures.

These primitive clumps gradually evolved into the graceful spirals and majestic ellipticals we see today. The emergence of well-defined discs and spiral arms, according to mainstream theory, required billions of years of gravitational settling and star formation.