Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2024

JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2024 cated with the recent publi- cation in Nature of an article (also signed by our sci- entific consultant, Enrico Maria Corsini; first author Luca Costantin) announcing the discovery of a barred spiral galaxy structurally sim- ilar to the Milky Way, called ceers- 2112 (where “ceers” stands for Cosmic Evolution Early Release Sci- ence survey) and already exist- ing when the universe was two billion years old. The simulations do not predict the exis- tence of this type of mature galaxy at a redshit beyond z=1.5 (about nine billion years after the Big Bang), while ceers-2112 is found at z=3. The presence of highly evolved gal- axies in the very young universe cannot be explained by current cos- mological models, which are based on the concept of expansion of the universe following the Big Bang. These models agree in dating the beginning of everything to around T his image represents the evo- lution of the universe, start- ing from the Big Bang (according to Rajendra Gupta). [NASA] o f galaxies that have gone through billions of years of evolution. The situ- ation has become further compli-