Two researchers at Pune’s National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA) in India have discovered a “galaxy deemed impossible by the current understanding of galaxy formation.” Named Alaknanda after a Himalayan river, this galaxy was born when the universe was just 1.5 billion years old, making it one of the oldest spiral galaxies ever found.
JWST has discovered a remarkably mature spiral galaxy named Alaknanda in the early Universe The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted a grand-design spiral galaxy (officially A2744-QSO1, nicknamed Alaknanda) with two clearly defined arms — observed when the Universe was only… pic.twitter.com/3qbRlTeXhw
— Black Hole (@konstructivizm) December 5, 2025
Researchers Rashi Jain and Yogesh Wadadekar spotted it while studying a data set by the James Webb Space Telescope of a galaxy cluster named Abell 2744. In the paper published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, the researchers revealed that Alaknanda was detected through gravitational lensing, a phenomenon in which gravity warps spacetime and bends light emerging from background objects.
What is gravitational lensing?
Gravitational lensing occurs when a massive celestial body warps spacetime, which causes the light moving around it to bend, like a lens does. Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which fuses time and space, states that gravity is simply the curvature of spacetime, not a pulling force.
The most popular analogy of this theory is imagining a heavy metal ball placed on a stretched rubber sheet. The ball causes a dip in the sheet creating a curved surface. If you roll a few marbles on this rubber sheet, they would follow the curved path created by the ball. This is exactly how the planets in our solar system orbit the Sun. The Sun is the ball, space is the rubber sheet and planets are the marbles.
According to the relativity theory, planets orbit stars because the fabric of space around the star is curved, and even light travelling through this path bends along the way.
Gravitational lensing is theory of relativity in action. Galaxy clusters like Abell 2744, whose gravitation is unimaginably strong, significantly warp spacetime. In the process, they act as gravitational lenses and path of light from objects behind them gets curved, producing a stretched or distorted image of the distant objects. But the most valuable consequence of this lensing is magnification.
The distortion of light by a massive foreground object causes the object in the background, which otherwise would be too far and too faint to be seen, appear larger and nearer than they actually are. In Alaknanda’s case, the Abell cluster acted as a cosmic magnifying glass that unveiled the obscure galaxy.
The Alaknanda galaxy
The study authors noted in their paper that the Alaknanda galaxy spans 33,000 light-years across and has two spiral arms, which is surprising for a galaxy born just 1.5 billion years after the big bang.
Its star forming regions have a “beads on a string” pattern and the galaxy weighs 10 billion solar masses, again, unusual for a young galaxy. Scientists also found that Alaknanda is forming stars at a rate of around 60 suns per year, far greater than the Milky Way’s current rate.
The finding challenges the established understanding of how quickly large, well-formed galaxies can emerge. Alaknanda appears to have developed into a mature spiral galaxy far sooner than expected for galaxies of its kind.
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