Spiral morphology in an intensely star-forming disk galaxy more than 12 billion years ago

Abstract

Spiral features in the early Universe The early assembly of galaxies is thought to have produced disturbed and asymmetric objects. Morphological features seen in nearby galaxies, such as stellar disks, bulges, and spiral arms, require time to form and would be disturbed by the frequent galaxy mergers that occurred at early times. Tsukui and Iguchi identified a distant galaxy containing a disk of gas with a spiral morphology. The galaxy also has a compact central mass concentration due to a combination of a supermassive black hole and a possible stellar bulge. These features must have formed within 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang. Science , abe9680, this issue p. 1201