A1689B11 is an extremely old

spiral galaxy Spiral galaxies form a galaxy morphological classification, class of galaxy originally described by Edwin Hubble in his 1936 work ''The Realm of the Nebulae''

Abell 1689 Abell 1689 is a galaxy cluster in the constellation Virgo (constellation), Virgo over 2.3 billion light-years away. Details Abell 1689 is one of the biggest and most massive galaxy clusters known and acts as a gravitational lens, distorting the i ...

galaxy cluster in the Virgo constellation about 11 billion light years from

Earth Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only astronomical object known to Planetary habitability, harbor life. This is enabled by Earth being an ocean world, the only one in the Solar System sustaining liquid surface water. Almost all ...

. The disk of A1689B11 is cool and thin, yet it produced stars at thirty times the rate of the

Milky Way The Milky Way or Milky Way Galaxy is the galaxy that includes the Solar System, with the name describing the #Appearance, galaxy's appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars in other arms of the galax ...

. With a lookback time (the difference between the age of the

universe The universe is all of space and time and their contents. It comprises all of existence, any fundamental interaction, physical process and physical constant, and therefore all forms of matter and energy, and the structures they form, from s ...

now and the age of the universe at the time light left the

galaxy A galaxy is a Physical system, system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar medium, interstellar gas, cosmic dust, dust, and dark matter bound together by gravity. The word is derived from the Ancient Greek, Greek ' (), literally 'milky', ...

) of 11 billion years in the

concordance cosmology The Lambda-CDM, Lambda cold dark matter, or ΛCDM model is a mathematical model of the Big Bang theory with three major components: # a cosmological constant, denoted by lambda (Λ), associated with dark energy; # the postulated cold dark matte ...

, A1689B11 is forming 2.6 billion years after the

Big Bang The Big Bang is a physical theory that describes how the universe expanded from an initial state of high density and temperature. Various cosmological models based on the Big Bang concept explain a broad range of phenomena, including th ...

. And its present comoving distance is about 19.4 billion light-years from the Earth. It is one of the most distant known spiral galaxies .

References

Spiral galaxies Virgo (constellation) Dwarf spiral galaxies {{Spiral-galaxy-stub

See also

References