| Big Wheel galaxy | |
|---|---|
 A James Webb Space Telescope image of Big Wheel galaxy. It is the reddish spiral galaxy located at the center of the image. The blueish galaxy near the Big Wheel in the upper right corner is 50 times closer (1.5 billion Light Years) to us then the Big Wheel. | |
| Observation data (J2000 epoch) | |
| Constellation | Phoenix |
| Right ascension | 00h 41m 35.113s [1] |
| Declination | −49° 37′ 12.42″ [1] |
| Redshift | 3.245 |
| Characteristics | |
| Mass | 370 billion M☉ |
| Half-light radius (physical) | 9.6 kpc |
| Half-light radius (apparent) | 1.3 arcsec |
The Big Wheel galaxy is a giant spiral galaxy that existed at least as far back as 2 billion years after the Big Bang. It was accidentally discovered in 2024 in an image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope while exploring a nearby quasar. The galaxy is 12 billion Light years away in the Constellation Phoenix. This disk galaxy is much bigger then the other galaxies back then. This seems to challenge current models of galaxy growth in the early universe. In 2022 to 2023, research conducted by the Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer onboard the Chandra X-Ray Observatory concluded that this galaxy is a Seyfert Galaxy because it has an Active Galactic Nucleus. [1]
It is much larger than other spiral galaxies in the same time, which seems to challenge current models of galaxy growth in the early universe. [2] The authors who made the discovery say that it "suggests the presence of favourable physical conditions for large-disk formation in dense environments in the early Universe". [1]
