Astronomers Discover Universe’s Earliest Galaxies Were Organized Whirlpools

The early universe was a pretty orderly place, not the gigantic mess that some people may imagine when they think about the aftermath of the Big Bang, according to new research.

When a team of scientists took a look into distant galaxies, seeing what those systems looked like when they were forming almost 13 billion years ago, they found that the gases inside them were swirling similarly to the organized motion of the Milky Way despite their young age.

A study in the journal Nature says the gases in the two primitive galaxies looked like the “turbulent yet rotation-dominated disks” that have been noted in mature galaxies from 2 billion years later.

Their conclusions were based on their study of infrared light emanating from the infant galaxies and show what the universe looked like 800 million years after the Big Bang exploded it into being.

“This is the first time that it has been possible to detect movement in galaxies at such an early point in the universe’s history,” the University of Cambridge said in a statement.

The university compares the spin to a whirlpool, which is comparable to the motion one would see while observing our own galactic home.

“Despite their relatively small size — about five times smaller than the Milky Way — these galaxies were forming stars at a higher rate than other young galaxies, but the researchers were surprised to discover that the galaxies were not as chaotic as expected,” according to the university.

The data came from the radio telescopes at the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile.

“In the early universe, gravity caused gas to flow rapidly into the galaxies, stirring them up and forming lots of new stars — violent supernova explosions from these stars also made the gas turbulent,” research Renske Smit explained in the statement. “We expected that young galaxies would be dynamically ‘messy,’ due to the havoc caused by exploding young stars, but these mini-galaxies show the ability to retain order and appear well regulated.”

Supernovas occur when stars get too big, either because they expand at the ends of their lives or because they swallowed up too much matter from another source, such as a close companion star. They are some of the biggest explosions in the universe.