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Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered the oldest known spiral galaxy, a 10.7-billion-year-old anomaly that by all rights shouldn’t exist. The galaxy was present in the early universe, about 3 billion years after the Big Bang, at a time when galaxies were still forming and normally looked clumpy and irregular. “The vast majority of old galaxies look like train wrecks,” said UCLA astronomer Alice E. Shapley, one of the discoverers of the unusual spiral galaxy. “Our first thought was, why is this one so different, and so beautiful?”
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