Free Astronomy Magazine July-August 2025

JULY-AUGUST 2025 funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, has discovered a surpris- ingly mature spiral galaxy just one billion years after the Big Bang. This is the most distant, earliest known spiral galaxy in the Universe. This galaxy, named Zhúlóng — meaning ‘Torch Dragon’ in Chinese mythol- ogy, a creature associated with light and cosmic time — was discovered as part of the PANORAMIC survey. This project is being conducted with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and is co-led by Williams and Pascal Oesch of the University of Geneva (UNIGE). The research was motivated by building a wide-area imaging sur- vey using JWST to complement fu- ture wide-area surveys based out of by NOIRLab Josie Fenske & Baptiste Lavie The oldest known spiral galaxy in the Universe L arge, grand-design spiral galax- ies like our own Milky Way are common in the nearby Universe. But they have proven hard to find in the early Universe, which is consis- tent with expectations that large disks with spiral arms should take many billions of years to form. How- ever, assistant astronomer Christina Williams of NSF NOIRLab, which is